This trip has been a little unusual, because I haven’t brought a computer and I just use my phone for everything. Which is neat, for a few reasons:
1. I can finally do basically everything I need on a phone. horray smartphones
2. not lugging a 3+ lb big lunk of metal
3. less dead time; even on a bus or whatever I can be reading about new places, writing these dumb blogs, playing video games, etc.

The downside is, it makes me wonder if I’m missing out on something, like paying less attention to the world around me while I stare at my phone.

But, as usual with worries like this, I’m just going to ignore it, because without any way to measure it or any bad feelings about it, I’m basically just parroting the “fear new technology for insidious reasons” meme that’s been circulating for about a thousand years.

Plus, it’s kinda how the world is now. A lot of our life is on our phones/computers now. You say I’m missing something in Sichuan; I say I’m missing ten minutes that I would be on the subway and I’m learning more about the city in the process. In traveling, I give up one world temporarily to experience another, but maybe I only need to give up 70% of that world and I can keep the 30% that’s online. And that 30%, through blogging and discussing things as they happen, as well as looking up stuff about the places I’m going, helps me make the 70% of the time richer too.