wujcik.blog

Kate and I are back after a phenomenal trip to Asia!

First to Hong Kong where we spent happy, happy days with Sara, David and eight-month-old Tristan (aka, ‘Bean,’ Kate’s great-grandson). Getting to Shanghai required the logistics of scoring (1) extra pages for my passport, which now bulges like an over-sized little book, and (2) visas for visiting Mainland China (not possible without the extra pages in the passport).

Various people had urged me to seek out advice and possible treatment from Asian medicine while I was visiting China. I didn’t have time to do any searching, but in three instances, the world was kind enough to bring wonderful insight to me. The most spectacular and serendipitous was when I visited my friend Roy Horan on New Year’s Day, and was able to have an intensive one-on-one session with Lodreu Rabsel Rinpoche, an initiate of Tibetian Buddhism, from Nepal. as you can see from the following picture:

Of course, the most powerfully curative experience was being crawled over and played with Tristan (aka ‘Bean’):

Also wonderfully curative were spending time with all my wonderful friends and former students, at various times and places, but especially at two memorable meals; a lunch on Wednesday at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and a dinner at the amazing Yang’s Kitchen in Shanghai (both times nobody had to ask if I had a problem with my appetite since I was eating everything in sight!). At the Thursday night dinner in Shanghai, my good friend Louis Tremblay took some spectacular photographs (see picture at top), and was kind enough to post them on his website online. Here’s the link: http://www.pbase.com/ltremblay/erick_wucjik

We made it back in time for my second round of chemotherapy here in California. The next trip is scheduled for Michigan, to take place right after my third chemo, arriving by January 24th in Detroit.

Erick (San Rafael, California)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 6:29 am and is filed under Hong Kong, Shanghai, cancer, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.