Most of the snow melted, and it’s just not very pretty anymore. Basically about two weeks’ worth of trash is resurfacing. In other news, though, I’m excited! Tomorrow I’m leaving Nanjing for the first time since I got here, and I just realized how weird it is that I’ve stayed in the same city without leaving for three solid months. Granted, it’s been three solid months during which I regularly feel like I’m living on Mars, but it’ll still be good to get out and see something different.
The usual suspects and I are heading to Jiujiang, which I think may be familiar to anyone who’s following Survivor: China, or anyone who’s following Chris Clanton. We’re taking a bus, and it’s a little pitiful how excited I got packing my little travel bag with headphones, a journal, a book, and other things I need to go anywhere (kleenex, hand sanitizer, small change, lip balm). I really like going places. It’s really fun having the freedom to hop on a bus and go somewhere, knowing that it won’t be a huge deal if we can’t get return tickets. As far as I know, it’s a sad fact of Chinese bus travel that you can’t get round trip tickets, and that’s a little bit of an adventure during the time of year when all 1.3 billion Chinese people are traveling (minus the poor guys working at McDonald’s and the bus drivers). Our plan is to find out how long we’re staying when we arrive, and I like that. It makes me feel young and spontaneous again.
So it’s officially the year of the mouse, and happy lunar new year to you. Incidentally, today (Friday) is the second day of Spring Festival, which is the communal birthday of dogs. So be kind to them today. I’m not sure if anyone else in China is celebrating that except me - here’s an article from slate about what’s become of entirely too many Chinese New Year traditions. But by god there were still fireworks! Actually, several people who’ve lived in other parts of China mentioned that they were a little disappointed by Nanjing’s fireworks offering, but I’d never seen anything like it in my entire life.
We took a long walk to the bus station Wednesday to buy our tickets for Jiujiang, and I was really disappointed by how few people were out on the streets. I thought Spring Festival was supposed to be a giant street party, but Nanjing seemed weirdly deserted - everything was closed, no one was out, and it felt vaguely post-apocalyptic. I was really worried that there wouldn’t be anything to see. But the sound of firecrackers got louder as it got darker, and by midnight, it was absolutely insane. We went up to the roof to watch, and Chris took plenty of quality pictures:
but they don’t quite do justice to what it was like to stand up there, watching bursts go up everywhere I looked, not to mention people hanging firecrackers out their windows, or shooting rockets out of them. First of all, the noise was incredible. Second, there were explosions going on all over the city. It wasn’t an organized thing, just families celebrating the holiday, but in a really splashy, loud, beautiful way, and families all over a huge city I was sitting on top of. Admittedly, I’ve seen better fireworks. But I’ve never seen that many, at eye level, going 360 degrees. It was extremely cool.
And unfortunately, the whole thing made me crazy homesick for some reason. The thing that I hate about homesickness: it’s incredibly sneaky. I never see it coming - I’m usually minding my own, happy, well-acclimated business, when suddenly BAM I want my cats my family my old bed my car drinkable tap water Taco Bell my old apartment my friends my old cell phone my snakes my bookshelves customer service reps who speak English Arkansas highways Dr. Pepper normal internet stores that sell jeans that actually fit me the Springdale library physical American newspapers, etc, etc, etc. I can keep the list going for an extremely long time during a moment.
I guess I already had my first big ol’ culture shock moment in December. There were definitely a couple of weeks in there where well-meaning (and extremely patient) people kept telling me that it was perfectly normal to feel like that after moving to a new country, even though at the time I couldn’t imagine that going from Arkansas to China could have a thing in the world to do with my frustration, feelings of incompetency, rampant hypochondria, and panicked irritability. But it didn’t last too long, and I was extremely fortunate to have a really good support network in place. I’m sure there’s going to be a round two in my future, and it’ll probably be worse, but hopefully next time I’ll be a little quicker to start dealing with it.
But homesickness is different and weird. It’s not a sustained feeling, and it’s also not something I’m sure I’ve ever felt before. I was really ready to leave London when I spent a term “studying” there, but that didn’t have so much to do with the fact that I missed the United States so much as the fact that I’d run completely out of money and was living off the complementary toast in the hotel kitchen. I remember being freaked out when I went to college, but not homesick, per se, or not the homesickness that feels like walking upstairs and running out of steps without noticing. The good news, though, is that most of the time I feel pretty normal. Really, my daily life isn’t that different - my preferred ways of spending my time are mostly the same - hanging out with friends, reading, writing, playing around on the internet, people watching, going out to eat. Granted, there’s been a very dramatic change of cast and of scenery, but overall, I still feel like myself and this still feels like my life. When I moved here, I felt like I was scrapping everything and starting completely over, and it is a little bit of a relief to realize that my Self or whatever made it through that transition intact.
And I didn’t mean to get quite that heavy-handed. Anyway, road trip tomorrow! I’ll take lots of good pictures and make lots of good stories happen, promise!
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