After some turbulent flights - at one point the kids screamed rather loud from the plane dropping a bit, but they did so joyously as though on a roller coaster - we landed in Xining at something like 9:30pm. We collected all our luggage, waited in line for all the suitcases to be checked against our claim tickets (they actually do that here, nice!), and found the man waiting to take us home in his van.
Nothing in China ever stays the same for very long and I noticed this immediately as we drove out of the airport. The road was different. The signage was different. The airport is about 45 minutes outside of town and I enjoyed a quiet ride along the highway towards town. As we drew nearer I could feel the excitement welling up. I wanted to crane my neck out the windows, but they don't open, and see all that I could see in the dark. However Anastasia was leaning up against one side of me mostly asleep listening to an mp3 player and Sophia was sitting on my lap preventing me from doing anything!
Xining is entered from the east end when coming from the airport and we live on the far other end. First the train station came into view, well lit in the dark, and it looks largely the same but that is slightly misleading as a train station has been built passed our apartment complex and all passenger traffic is handled there now. Parts of the middle of town were next, is that the Red Cross hospital I can see, maybe that's the hotel where some friends of ours were married a couple years ago, there's wang fu jin (an upscale shopping centre), and there's the complex where so and so lives. Everything was decorated for the up come Lantern Festival. Bright lights. Colourful lights. Lots of dragon type statues as a welcome to the Year of the Dragon. And finally here is the highway turn off for our apartment. Looks the same mostly. The closer we come to our road and our home the more the scenery has changed.
My road has street lights! Well, on one side of the road there are street lights, the other side has plans for lights as evidenced by the posts laying in the middle of the sidewalk!
When we moved here almost 5 years ago our road ended at our complex and over the years it was extended but the land was left mostly empty. Right before we returned to Canada a year and a half ago there were new buildings going up. Now, there are at least 100 new buildings, each about 20 stories high. They dwarf our little complex made up of a dozen buildings not taller than 6 floors!
But our own apartment complex looks the same. It's packed with SUV's as so many people have come into town, some for the winter, many just for the holiday's. Our van driver drove down the little driveway to our entrance. It turns out the lock on the security door, unlocked with a key from the outside or a button on the inside, has since been changed and our key no longer works. So, at 10:30 at night we buzzed a bunch of our neighbours and yelled into the intercom, 'open the door, we don't have the right key!'. This seems utterly rude and very unneighbourly but our neighbours have done it to us so many times, some at 2 in the morning, it just seemed the normal thing to do! And it worked!
It was a warm feeling that rose up inside me upon walking into our apartment. The orange couch. The blue rug. The purple curtains. The red, blue, white, yellow striped futon type couch! These all make up my apartment in China and on this night they came together to feel like home.
Never mind that in less than a week we would be in a new apartment! To walk into a place on the other side of world, no where near where I was brought up and where people still look at me in surprise because I'm a foreigner, and feel at home is a most wonderful feeling. And I was tremendously relieved.
