Spring Break is over and it’s back to work at BISS for Judy. Most of our year has been a series of work weeks, spaced between travel. We don’t have anything scheduled now until school ends. We might make a weekend trip on a train somewhere close by, but no serious thought or planning has been applied yet.
I make a trip to Metro for groceries. When Lilly arrives around 1:00 pm, I travel to the Marriott for swim time. I’m hoping there isn’t a crowd at the pool. Today is the last day of the official government holiday called the Qingming Festival. Saturday and Sunday were also part of the holiday. The common term for the holiday is the tomb-sweeping holiday. Families are supposed to visit gravesites of relatives and clean them and deliver flowers. Traffic is greatly reduced, as most businesses are closed.
There is only one other person at the pool when I arrive. It’s a huge relief, because when I arrived, there were 12 coach buses in the street in front of the hotel. After swimming, I came downstairs and it was full of people wearing red windbreakers touting “Jackie Chan’s Peace, Friendship, and Love International Fan Tour.” I googled the phrase and found a lot of info about a celebration and charity concert for Jackie Chan’s 60th birthday. I’ve attached the pdf flyer with a schedule of activities. The people in the lobby were winners of a drawing from among 5000 applications submitted to the Jackie Chan Fan Club to participate in the tour. Many of the voices I hear around the hotel lobby seem to be from the US.
I walk over to the nearby Flower Market to explore. Leaving the Marriott, I notice police vehicles, and police officers standing around in the street, as well as a police wrecker designed to tow a vehicle. As I walk by, they begin stopping traffic, including bicycles, apparently blocking the road and clearing an exit out of a gated area. On the map, it shows there is a hospital in the area, as well as the embassy of Turkmenistan. Several more heavily armed officers get out of police vans, and start walking the intersection moving people back. 2 minutes later, a convoy of vehicles roll out of the gated area. It includes 8 to 10 black Audi sedans with blacked out windows, two mid-size coach busses full of people, two huge limos with flags flying on the front (I didn’t recognize the flags), several black SUVs full of security guys, and two Mercedes police vehicles with lights. I wish I knew what that was all about.