Perfect Rest

Dear Ones,

I may or may not have the opportunity to send any emails while in China. In any case, I thought I'd keep an account of life on a daily basis, so that when I do get the chance to email, either from here or from Korea, I won't have to dig back into the recesses of my mind to remember what happened when and where.

In these last forty four hours I've been able to catch a total of four hours of broken, alert sleep. So if what I write today seems in any way scattered or irrelevant, that will have to be my excuse. And I will continue to use it for the next thirty hours. My travels, you must understand, are only half over. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It wasn't too difficult to wave goodbye to you, two nights ago. I've said good-bye enough times that I'm pretty much able to disengage my mind, at times like that, from what's happening. So it wasn't until I actually stepped on to the plane, nine hours later, that a heavy weight settled on my chest, and my mind screamed at me, 'What on earth are you doing?!' Somehow planes always seem to have that effect on me…they're so irrevocable, you know. But I told myself that now was not the time to be entertaining such thoughts, and allowed the candy and cookies you sent along turn my mind to more pleasant, or at least less restless, channels.

The rest of the plane trip was uneventful enough to satisfy the most prosaic of travelers, if you don't count the fact that the seats were so squeezed together that my knees pressed into the seat in front of me for the entirety of the twelve hour flight from San Francisco. I was most sincerely thankful when we finally touch down in Beijing.

…Except, I'd never met (or, of course, seen) the man who was to meet me at the airport. I picked up my luggage, went through customs, and from there was quickly re-initiated into the very east-Asian method of maneuvering through a crowd (this, for those of you who are drawing a blank, employs mostly the elbows). And it was a crowd. I looked over the sea of glossy, black heads (I really don't know what for. As I said, I didn't know for whom I was looking) and quickly decided that the one who didn't have the luggage must be the one to do the finding. So I dragged everything over to a row of seats, pulled out a sudoku puzzle, and settled down to wait for an indefinite amount of time. It occurred to me that I should be a little nervous, at least. And certainly I berated myself for not having gotten Marvin's phone number, or at least having arranged a particular spot at which to meet him. But in the same moment I knew that He had His eyes on me, and absolutely had my hand in His. And sure enough, one from a multitude of Asian faces spotted me about a half an hour later, and called my name. He had been looking for me for several hours, and 'was just about to take off.'
'I'm very glad you didn't.' I replied with intense sincerity.

Marvin took me to the apartment where I'll stay tonight. To my very great joy, the elderly couple with whom I'm living speak fluent Korean so that we're able to hold basic, albeit stunted, conversation. Sometimes they laugh, so I know either that I've misunderstood their question, or somehow miscommunicated what I had attempted to say. It's all good practice, and I'm happy that, despite my deplorable lack of studying this summer, I'm able to pick up where I left off.

After exchanging some money into Chinese currency, Marvin brought me around the corner to a little cubby hole in a wall where I purchased a train ticket that will carry me up to Yenji tomorrow. That will be a twenty-one hour journey, which I'm not even remotely looking forward to. Marvin will put me in a taxi, give the driver directions to the depot, and then I will be on my own, with no way of contacting anyone, if I need help. As he was telling me this, he said, 'You should probably know that the driver won't take you all the way to the station, because he's not allowed to drive that far. He'll drop you off somewhere near by, and you'll have to find it from there.'
In relation to which train to take, 'Someone will be able to help you, but don't let anyone besides yourself hold your ticket. If you let go of it, you'll never get it back.'
And when I asked how I'll know at which station I'm eventually to disembark, 'Oh, you'll probably just know.'
The entirety of the trip is fraught with vaguenesses, and if you've ever spent time in a foreign country, you'll understand some of the discomfiture I experience in being set loose to find my ambiguous, twenty-one hour way, alone on my second day here. If it weren't for the absolute certainty that every step (I do not speak generally, but very specifically: every foot step) I take is Ordered and Prearranged, I would be experiencing every emotion other than that which I now feel, and that is perfect rest.

...

Yay! I get to send this sooner than I thought I would. I'll be taking off for the train station very soon, and hopefully (though by no means probably) will be able to send a quick email tomorrow, when I've arrived, letting you all know that I'm still alive and hopefully not too disoriented.

Missing you already,
Elisabeth