Leaving Baotou

Well, I'm not really sure why I haven't been updating this more frequently.

Anyways, I'm in Beijing! I got here... several weeks ago. The day I left Baotou, Julie called to say that she had to make an emergency trip with one of the babies, and so would be coming along on the same train. She needed to trade her ticket for a bottom bunk, so we thought it would be best if we could just trade our tickets onto the same car.

I actually finished packing mid-afternoon, and rather than ponder my fate in the sweltering apartment, I went out for a last chat with my fruit friend.

Alice came home, and we loitered for a while until Emily, one of the volunteers at the children's home, came to help with the move. Then the three of us loitered around until Linda and Alice's mom showed up, and we started to carry things downstairs. We found Helen's dad waiting outside the gate, and he went up to wrestle the large suitcase down the stairs and into the backseat of his car. Then we all piled into the two cars, and drove off.

We got to the train station just about on time, but Julie was late! All of us went onto the platform and finally got onto my car. There was some difficulty in this choice because we had originally planned to trade everything into the car they had. It's difficult for me to explain now, but her ticket was for a top bunk while mine was for a middle bunk, and bunks are valued and priced based on their vicinity to the ground. Extremely fortunately, Mr. Bao knew the family of the girl in the bottom bunk of my berth, and she was really nice anyway, so they traded right away. Then I went out as Julie came busting down the stairs with a bundle and a kind of harassed look about her.

We still needed to trade me into the car with all my luggage though... while it wasn't entirely necessary, I preferred it that way. After much ado and random flusteredness and bartering, everything worked out fine, the train rolled away, and I waved byebye to my Baotou friends.

A lot of times I think about going back up for a visit... though mainly to see certain babies and eat certain foods. But I think I'm mostly finished up there, it was a good year, but it's seriously just time to move on.