Goodbye Nanjing

Heading to Xining today! So looking forward to finally meeting my pet yak. I think I'm going to call him Fred.


Just said goodbye to my "Dracula"-reading roommate, Lydia (who declared the other night when I caught a falling shot glass that was knocked off the table: 'You've got the reflexes of a vampire!'). She is headed to Guangzhou to work at a school that prepares handicapped kids for careers. Seems like a great program, and I'm definitely hoping to make it down there for a visit.

She went with me yesterday to the clinic, possibly my last chance at reliable Western medicine, to finish up my shots. (That's right! Who's proud of me?) I was afraid if I went alone I might disappear into the black hole of the Chinese quarantine, and never be heard from again. But although they made us both pass the fever gun test before they'd even talk to me, I eventually emerged unscathed, and inoculated against all kinds of disagreeable ailments. Except rabies. And the Plague. And Japanese encephalitis.

This morning, we said goodbye to the people we've come to know and love. The always-helpful girls at McDonald's who give us our morning coffee. The wizened old man who sits on the corner and plays a pretty mean tune on a makeshift fiddle, and who always has a big smile for me -- even before I put money in his bucket, I might point out.

But chiefly: my baozi lady. Baozis are steamed buns stuffed with all different kinds of delicious goodness: Meat, or shredded turnip, or noodles, or red bean paste. Our relationship (mine and the baozi lady's) was a little constrained at first, limited by the deep cultural and language divide to a largely point-and-pantomime kind of kinship. Still, the bond was there. I never really knew what filling I was going to end up with, but I visited her shop every day, sometimes twice, and our friendship really blossomed last week when I was finally able to say "Excuse me, please, do you have pork buns today?" And she smiled -- not in a crass, overt way, of course, but on the inside, where it counts -- and handed me a pork bun.

Apparently, a few years back some scandal-mongering journalist levied some trumped up charges that many baozi makers were supplementing the fillings with as much as 60 percent cardboard. Much to Lydia's amusement (she wrote a blog entry on it), I choose to side with the Chinese government on this one. They promptly arrested the journalist, declared his story to be fabricated, and I'm pretty sure no one's heard from him since.

Alright, I'm off. The next time you hear from me, it'll be from high up in the Himalayas.