It’s official. Both mine and Phil’s obligation to the next generation of Fuyang has come to an end. Today was Phil’s last day, but I was lucky, and was able to stop teaching a week ago. Today I ran down and picked up my last chunk of change from my school and said my final farewells. Phil will get his tomorrow.

We’ve pretty much finished everything that needs to be done in order to move. We just need to pick up our passports and new visa from the PSB office in Hangzhou and possibly send one more package up north so that we don’t have to carry so much with us. We sent one today to our new school. It weighed about 44 lbs and only cost 110 RMB. That is about $14. If only that is how much it cost to ship things back to America. Going from Fuyang to Shenyang would be like going from Columbia to California. There is no way a 44 lbs package would cost 14 bucks to send in a million years. A few days ago, we sent two packages back home filled with some odds and ends that we have purchased in our travels. The biggest box weighed about 20 lbs and cost $204. We did send this the fast way, but still . . . that’s a lot of money and hurt our wallets. Mine is still crying about it. I just hope that it gets home. Apparently, they did not know where to send it even though they had all of the information on the box. They said that the zip code was wrong, and we had to repeatedly tell them that we lived there and knew our post code like we know our names. Of course, this was all said to people who really couldn’t understand us. Thankfully, there was a random man there who spoke a little English, and without him I don’t think we would have figured out what in the world was going on.

I don’t really know what else to say. My mind has felt tired and uninspired for awhile now. Everything I type seems so forced. Maybe it is that I can’t really put into words what I feel or express what it is that I am experiencing here. That is frustrating. Hopefully, it will pass, and I can resume my normal writing of this blog for the few people who do frequent it. The Internet is slowly getting repaired but it isn’t perfect yet. I am going to give it a while longer before I attempt to post pictures. I really, really hate posting pictures and not having it work after spending a lot of time on them.

Well, I’m signing off. I’m going to play Fable until I turn blue in the face. Tomorrow we finish or rather start packing. I can see Beijing on the horizon. It won’t be long now.

Goodbye Fuyang. Nice knowing you.