Today is friday. Tomorrow I leave for the western frontier of China with one of my students. He is taking me home to celebrate spring festival with his family. Nothing is packed. I have my train ticket and finally my passport. My passport has been bouncing between Nanjing and Wuxi for the last month or so as Doris was trying to secure a resident visa for my stay here. Yesterday we had a glitch. My picture was not appropriate for the application. They didn't tell us that a week ago when we handed the paper work in. I leave in two days and now I need a new picture of myself. The longer I am here the better I am at understanding the complexities of securing visas. If there is something that can go wrong it will. That is just the way it is. No worries. I went to the corner photo lab and had new pictures done immediately. Then Doris and I went down to the police station where my passport was to exchange pictures on my application. Why they didn't say anything a week ago is a mystery. No big deal. Not!! All they could do is reject my application and then I can't travel. Then my student gets upset, Doris is admonished for screwing things up and I am left in Wuxi with nothing to do. Doris jokes that if that happened I would have to fly to Hong Kong to do the paperwork. Hahahahaha... I told her if I had to do that I would just stay there. However, yesterday was a good day. They accepted the pictures, I got my passport back with a residents visa, good until July, pasted in it. Now I can travel to the far western region of China where I will spend Spring Festival with Colin and his family. I am so excited. I will be in a little place called Yining Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqi China. It is a village of some thirty thousand inhabitants about one hundred kilometers from the border of Kazakhstan. The temperature today in Yining is a balmy -5f partly cloudy skies with the threat of avalanches. We have planned a forty hour train ride to Urumqi and a ten hour bus ride to his village. My biggest worry is using the infamous chinese toilet. Up to this point it's been western technology all the way. What a thing to worry about. Silly. I'll be back some time in February. Goodbye big city! See ya on the other side! Happy travels! Happy Chinese New Year!