Pan Meets with David, 2 Dream Comes True
Pan Meets with David, 2 Dream Comes True
It's been a wild dream of mine to go to XinJiang to visit David. Here are the
facts to justify the term "wild dream": China is a huge country and XinJiang is right up there at the very western edge of the nation, and my town is situated
in the very south-eastern area of ZheJiang Province. How many days would I need to go to right another side of the country, how much would it cost, what was the climate out there, and what people I might have to rub elbows with on the way
? These were simply a few of the concerns I had every time the notion of visiting David came to me. It might remain a dream for me after all, I kept saying to
myself.
It did remain a dream, but a dormant one. We had been writing to each other on the forum or through Emails for all these years, and had voice chatted for time to time. The experience had always been exciting and encouraging, and what it
was to be like if we sat face-to-face shooting the breaze, or if we had a walk
together discussing anything that came to us? How different that would be from
conversations on the phone or through the Internet? And I would come to learn how he lived his life. I had known that they had an English school there, but how they operated their school and classes? How fun could that be? What was the
city of Dushanzi like? Was it like a small town on the grassland or was it a mere copy of any inland metropolises?
My curiosity about David and his life could never seem to be solved without a
real visit to him. Then came in a varity of versions XinJiang given by different people. Some said it was about a vast grassland where people raised sheep and
horses and some gossiped that XinJiang was an area of underdevelopment. The very common legand about XinJiang was that it was a bloody cold place, with temperatures hitting as slow as 20 degrees Centigrade, below zero of course. A net friend of mind even warned that people there had the custom of carrying a saber with them wherever they go. All sounded sort of, if not very, frightening to me,
a man who has never set his feet on any land beyond the south part of the nation
. To have somebody stabbing you at the back sounded scary enough, and a saber-rattling gesture engendered by linguistic misunderstandings could not be enjoyable, either.
But then I was finally convinced by the saying that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I would never know XinJiang, and its people, any better than I
could learn from the tales unless I took the plunge and went there to have a taste myself. So when David handed out the signal of welcoming, I decided it was
time.
A novice traveler who had never liked traveling alone, I was rather nervous about my trip. But finally the air tickets were in the pocket and everything was
packaged. The moment I boarded on the train to HanZhou from where I was to fly
over the entire country to the mysterious land of Urumqi, I realized this time it was for keeps; nothing could hold me back now. The dream had finally come true.
To be continued,
Panpanpan.
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