Finally, we left Chengdu. Early in the morning, we said our
goodbyes to Yeye and Laolao, and Erjiujiu took us to the train station. As we
were waiting for the train, Ada needed a diaper change. We have a folding
changing mat for her, with pockets for diapers and wet wipes, so I changed her right
there, on the benches, in the middle of the terminal. Everyone around was watching
every move I made. Men don’t change diapers in China, so the whole spectacle was
a real novelty to my audience. Having all this attention meant only one thing: I
had to give my best performance, and indeed, I was done in no time, including putting
Ada’s pants back on, folding the changing mat, and giving a deep bow to the
crowd.
Then we boarded the bullet train. Damn, that thing is fast! The
speed is displayed on a digital sign, and the fastest that I caught it was
around 250 km/h. There was so much noise on the train - everybody watching videos,
talking on their phones, without headphones, of course. One lady had a half an
hour discussion on the phone about how she should call one of her relatives, since
most of the time you call your relatives by the way they relate to you:
Erjiujiu, for example, means “Second uncle from mother’s side”. I call Erjiujiu
because I’m supposed to call people the same way Julia does. Anyway, through
all this noise, Ada and Julia managed to fall asleep, and I wrote a little,
read a little, and slept a little. 3 hours later, we arrived at Xi’an.
Laolao’s nephew, who Julia and I are supposed to simply call
Jiujiu, came to pick us up with his son. They didn’t bring a car or anything –
they just accompanied us and helped us carry our stuff. He’s very nice and he
was getting along pretty well with Ada. After we got to our hotel and dropped
off our stuff, they took us to have lunch at a restaurant just around the
corner from our hotel. It’s a local dish which is a soup with small pasta cubes
and slices of goat meat. There’s a lot of goat meat here, which I guess is, to
some extent, an influence of the large Muslim population here.
We went to see the Drum Tower, that was built in the 14th century. Back in the days, drums would be played there every day at sunset. Today, it hosts a small drum museum and the world’s largest drum.
Then we went to hang out in the Muslim quarter. It’s super touristy,
and the plus side of that is that we could get all kinds of street food as
dinner. Julia was still not feeling great, so I was doing most of the eating. I
had a fantastic, super juicy goat (I think) skewer with tons of cumin, a disappointing
pita stuffed with chopped goat stew meat, a soggy but nice persimmon fritter, and
a bowl of tiny spicy potatoes. I had a blast.
People stared at Ada constantly. Some people even took pictures
of her, and at some point, Julia got really annoyed because nobody asked us if
that’s o.k. She even gave one lady a hard time over it, and the lady deleted
the picture, but then we saw someone taking a picture from across the street, with
a zoom lens! We stopped to regroup, and I told Julia that the way I see it, we
can’t win this war, so we might as well let people have that moment of joy when
they look at her. I know I’m not objective, and that to me she’ll always be the
cutest – I actually already decided that even when we have more kids, Ada will
stay my favorite – but it does seem like Ada spreads a special light in the world.
Either that or she’s a freak and I just can’t see it. These are the only
explanations I can see for all this attention she’s drawing. Here, you be the
judge:
We then watched this beautiful dancing water fountain for a
bit while Ada took a massive dump, we changed her on a bench and called it a
day.
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