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June 18, 2005
Thursday's child...is sick and tired of Nanchang, more or less
Last night was, in a word, awful.
We gave Emma some Tylenol to help her fever. She went down more or less on time, but moaned and cried out all night, which in turn kept us awake. I'm sick with what I believe is some kind of infection. Lara is sick with the same. On top of that, past about 3am, it becomes very difficult to sleep for all the heat -- they apparently shut the A/C down around then. We gave up and pulled the duvet out of the cover, sleeping under the cover itself. We rose early-ish, like always, and had the standard breakfast.
Then, we spent most of the day sitting around the room, nibbling a bit, and trying to find anything Western on the television. We settled for a few minutes of a Japanese rebroadcast of the Brewers-Devil Rays game. Small, but it helped. We managed to find a few minutes of CNN as well. Around midafternoon, we decided to brave the heat and pollution, and wandered a couple of blocks up Dieshan Lu to the pedestrian mall. We got a few odd looks on the way, but on the mall, our day brightened a bit. There, people kept stopping to admire Emma and smile at us. One woman with a fat baby boy in tow pointed to Emma, saying "Mei mei!" (baby), as the boy repeated. He held Emma's hand for a moment before we smiled and departed.
We had gone to the mall hoping to find the rumored McDonald's, but had to turn around for the hotel before we located it. Neither of use had eaten much in the last day or so, and being up to our eyeballs in Chinese food, we were looking for some McNuggets and fries. Does that spell desperation? Yes, it does.
Back at the hotel, we boarded yet another bus (and on the subject of things we're sick of, add buses to the list, way up high), and headed downtown to the police station, by way of the local porcelain shopping street. Neither of us felt like shopping, and with no real room in the suitcases for something so fragile, we felt disinclined to buy. So we browsed and stood by the air conditioner for an hour. Then it was off to the police station, where we got Emma's passport. From there, we returned to the hotel.
We decided to eat dinner in the room, since we were all sick and no one felt very hungry. We figured we'd just order some noodles. Do you have any clue how incredibly frustrating it is to be in a place where you can't even order a bloody bowl of noodles because the language barrier is so complete? The doctor has gone on to Guangzhou, so we're on our own in a foreign country, first time parents with a sick kid. We're feverish and stuck in a hotel room and can't even get food without calling our guide. I don't think either of us has ever felt so lost and out of place before.
I suspect Nanchang is a hard place to be, as a non-business visitor, in the best of times. There's simply not that much going on, tourism-wise. That I'm familiar with -- Charlotte's the same way. But with all the stress of the last few days, it just seems all the harder. We've both had entirely too much Chinese food, entirely too much of stopping to worry about whether we remembered to use the bottled water rather than the tap, entirely too much of living out of a suitcase and trying to learn to be parents at the same time.
We need our families, our home, our pets, our routine. We need our support system. This is a thoroughly surreal way to become a parent to begin with, and the current state of affairs has just about made it intolerable. At this point, we're just praying to make it through to Friday and the plane out to Guangzhou. I will always have a special place for Nanchang in my heart...she is the city that brought our family together. But she is a hard, hard mistress for the monoglot Westerner with allergies, and I doubt I will miss her once we're gone.
Posted by brlittle at June 18, 2005 07:50 PM