Vanessa's Journal

Dec. 9

Every time that I go to the big city of Chengdu on my way to Wolong I always leave thinking that I won’t come back for a few months.  And yet I always come back to Chengdu a week later.  Without fail.  I’m not sure how that works. 

This time, I was trudging my busted computer along with the faint hope of someone clapping their hands together and magically fixing it for me.  Of course, it didn’t work out that way.  I left it in some random office building with people who said they work for my computer company.  They said things like “we’ll call you in a few days but we can’t promise anything”.  I left thinking maybe I would never see it again.  I was sad about it for about five minutes and then I decided to do some retail therapy.  I was tempted by the elegant IBM Thinkpad enough to give a computer guy who looked younger than me a whole lot of Chinese yuan for one of my very own.  Merry Christmas. 

The Chengdu trip also was not completely fruitless because I had a glass of real orange juice and bought about a year’s worth of the biodegradable detergent I had been obsessing over.