Last Wednesday

This is it, folks! This is our very last Wednesday post together. In less than a week, I will be back in Maine. I have no idea what my next steps are. I have a few short term plans (baby shower! yard sale! re-enactment! dentist appointment! No, it is not strange at all that I look forward to those) but nothing long-term. I'm okay with that. Well, no, that's a lie. But, I want to okay with that. I am making a conscious decision to be optimistic.

These flowers are being optimistic.

Time passes so quickly and so slowly. I'm speaking mostly about this last week, which seems long but is easily filled with all of the last minute things I need to do and last chances to do the things I've come to enjoy here. The sentiment stands true, though, when I consider the whole year. A year is nothing. A year is everything. This year has been new friends, new experiences, new perspectives, and new places. I had a short list of goals in my head when I arrived here, and I've actually done a rather good job on them (something that cannot generally be said about my new years' resolutions). In a week I will be home, and it will be time to try to make sense of my time in Guangzhou. Boil it down to two or three lines on my resume, if you will. I'm not sure it's possibly, though, to sum it all up -- to bring it to a tidy point. It's life, and it's messy. I've loved it and hated it and I can't stand another minute of it and I want it to last forever. The only thing that's constant and true is that it will end. Then, something else will begin.

When one oddly-shaped door closes...

I feel these are slightly large thoughts and I'm not being particularly articulate now (this is what I get for putting off my blogging until 11pm in favor of one last trip to the conveyor-belt sushi place). So instead, let's look at some pictures from my trip to Nanjing. I promise you one more blog post when I have made it home, because this needs some sort of conclusion, even if it is just the cliffhanger at the end of this particular episode.

Nanjing, from the city wall near Dongguanmen

Nanjing! Oh, it was fun. I've finally discovered what kind of person I am when I'm traveling alone. The answer: just like me in normal life, I am quiet, not particularly out-going, and stupidly stubborn about not taking taxis, even if the museum is two kilometers away and it's pouring rain.

It was an unexpectedly long gap between bus stops.

It did rain everyday, alas, but I still managed to do most everything I wanted to do (read: I visited 6 museums /historic sites in 2.5 days). My favorite was the Museum of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (hugely successful mid-19th century rebellion), but sadly there are few pictures of this, because my camera batteries died about 5 feet into the museum and I stupidly forgot to bring the spare batteries I had thoughtfully packed. I made up for it by taking eight pages of notes in my travel journal, which I was carrying. These include some diagrams of new battle formations for the 2nd Mass to try out. My personal favorite is the "formation of a small crab circle by a big crab," although the "snake" formation for ambuscades seemed to be both useful for battle and for dance parties.

This was a very interesting gun.

I also went to the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, which was a solemn and uncomfortable experience. There are a number of photographs and eye-witness testimony in text and video along with physical artifacts and an excavated mass grave. The capacity of people to both commit and survive atrocities stupefies me.

On a lighter note, I visited the Ming-era city wall, an imperial exam school, a Confucian temple, and the Nanjing Brocade Museum (oh yeah. A whole museum devoted to a particular type of textile? And you could watch people actually weaving!). I tried twice to find the folk handicrafts museum, to no avail (pro-tip: the Nanjing tourist map is worthless.) I took an evening cruise of the river, wandered around the tourist souvenir street, and ate delicious street food. Liangpi noodles! Jiangyouji dumplings! Black rice steamed cakes!

FYI, that pattern is hand-woven.

And that was about it. It was a nice, smooth trip. I can only hope my trip home this week is just as easy (35 hours of transit time). Here's a fun parting thought: as I'm going home overland/across the Atlantic, and I arrived in China on a transpacific flight, this trip really has taken me around the world. See you next week, in Maine.