He was even rude about English cities. Standing in a rainy Midlands literary festival he once told an interviewer, with heavy sarcasm: "I count a year wasted that does not include a visit to... ...... (pause) "Bir-ming-ham".
"Otherwise, why would the party secretary have come all the way here?" Asked what the government had done before Mr. Xi's visit, he paused and shook his head.
On today's school visit he pauses on his way to the assembly hall to shake the hands of both receptionists and beguile them with a brief discourse on St Swithin.
Cycling through half a dozen in an hour, he accepted the greetings of gallery owners and patrons with the practiced diffidence of a visiting celebrity, pausing only briefly to ask the price of a hyperrealist painting of a Duncan yo-yo, by an artist named Kyle Surges.
On a recent visit, many museumgoers paused in front of "Untitled (Yellow Sky)," a wildly kitschy photograph of a setting sun, from 2000, snapping it with their smartphones.
On a recent visit, Mr. Cetera paused in front of the house and looked askance at the gleaming white balustrade on the building's new front porch.
By the same token, if I'm awaiting a return call from a specialist about a particular patient, I'll pause a visit to handle the more urgent matter first.
Just make sure you're ready to go, then visit You can't pause and you only get an hour at a time to get as many points as you can! Go to the bathroom, figure out what your little sister wants, eat dinner, take out the trash, whatever.
Returning home via Hong Kong, Cambodia, India, Afghanistan and Turkey, she paused to visit the theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine and bought her first camera in Japan.
As he looks back over photos of his last visit to Aleppo, Syria, he pauses for a moment over a picture of two young doctors, smiling at the camera in their blue scrubs.
