life is good

less than 10 minutes til olympics! and about 12 hours til i board a plane for US. everyone who went to the hospital has now returned. we’re happy and packing and our teachers are getting up at 5am to see us off to the airport tomorrow.

this time in china, even though it was only 2 months as opposed to 6-7, has changed my mind about a lot of things china. last time changed my mind too, but my idea of china before coming to china doesn’t count as much. Harbin’s changed my mind for the better.

i went to the post office this morning to send things, which i’m never doing again from china b/c while it’s always fun to get a package from china, it costs about 10 times what the things inside the package cost. but it’s on condi. anyway, b/c of olympics everything’s extremely strict and so i ended up only being able to send one or two of the
things i wanted to send, so i decided to send cards to some of the people whose gifts got vetoed.

i asked for an envelope and put my letter inside and then licked the back to seal it. i looked up and every office clerk in the place was looking at me like ‘what the hell is wrong with foreigners’ - they were all kind of looking b/c i’m a foreigner, but when i licked the envelope, which by the way had no glue on it - that’s apparently an American or Western thing, they looked at me like i was absolutely nuts.

then the clerk helping me took my envelope and sealed it with glue. she also decided then to grab my postcards, maybe so i wouldn’t lick them too. it’s so funny realizing the things that are uniquely American/Western or uniquely Chinese.

it’s like yesterday - which i can’t remember if i already wrote about - how i used my two fingers to make quotation marks in the air when i said “chinglish”, since it’s not actually a real word, and the man thought i was nuts and trying to signal to him that i wanted 22 shirts instead of 40.

apparently also true for shrugging. one of the chinese student zhuli’s said to my friend the other day:  “whenever you do this <shrugs>, i have no idea why”.  idk though, i feel like shrugging is universal. i think it might just be that zhuli…

ok i’m gonna go. some friends are leaving early b/c not going home with us and i want to go say goodbye.

last email from china (this time anyway..).

we got t-shirts made for the group. they say some cute little thing in chinglish on the back like:

900 New Words
250 Bottles of Water
45 Hours on a Bus
4 People to the ER
2 Boat Rides in Thunderstorms
4 surgeries
Spending Condi’s Money and Understanding 50% of What is Said
PRICELESS

sadly, we will now have to take sharpies to the line that says “4 People to the ER”, cross out the four and make it 5. it looks like the same will have to be done for the surgeries line.

our friend A is at the hospital right now, where we’re frequent customers, and they’re deciding if she needs a collar bone operation right now, or if she can wait til back in the US. she has a ‘broken’ collar bone. - i put ‘broken’ in quotes b/c that’s the chinese translation, but i’m not sure that it’s what we’d consider broken in the States.
what it means is that there’s one section of her clavicle that does not connect in any part. this is too much detail. anyway.

we were playing the flying bird, and we play rough - but this happened during warm up. we play on this field that is ‘luan qi ba zao’ - which translates literally to ‘chaos seven eight terrible’. and it is. the grass is up to our knees, there are holes, muddy sections, broken glass sections where you’re not allowed to fall or dive for the frisbee, - it’s a mess. but the soccer players kept reserving the other nice field and since we’re not an ‘official’ HeiDa team, we can’t reserve it. so, we play on chaos seven eight terrible field.

and it’s great. we drag rusty net-less old soccer goals to make our endzones, we use piles of plants to mark out of bounds, and we get really dirty and usually a little beaten up. but only a little.

we were warming up and A and this other very large girl both jumped for the frisbee and collided in mid-air and i heard something bad happen in A’s body from 10 feet away. she fell and turned completely pale and without a word grabbed her shoulder and walked off the field to sit.

after a while it was clear it wasn’t just a bump and we called a cab to go to hospital. sigh. yesterday was our last day of classes. today was our final exam day. we tested for 4 hours this morning. tomorrow we ‘graduate’. we thought we might be safe from this craziness that keeps happening.

this was a physical injury though. this wasn’t H City getting in and giving you appendicitis or enlarging your spleen, etc. it still sucks.

okay, happier note. in other news: classes are over. yay? obligations aren’t yet. i still have somewhere to be tomorrow at 8am. no i am happy though. i treated my teachers to lunch today. during which they ordered an excessive excessive amount of food, as is chinese tradition, because they don’t see food that you don’t eat with rice as food.

for example, mcdonald’s - all food at mcdonald’s, like burgers, quarterpounders, etc - are snacks, because they don’t come with rice. dumplings are also snacks. you eat four plates of dumplings and a quarter-pounder and tell me it was just a ’snack’. anyway. oh - also, chickens aren’t considered birds. they’re in the ‘house animals’ category, like cats or dogs.

okay in the time it took to write those paragraphs A’s begun surgery. i guess ‘broken’ really is broken. on a serious positive note though, all these injuries are showing how caring everyone is. the administration here is..a lost cause. especially on the incompetent incompetent american side. but the students on this program know how to step up when needed. we take shifts bringing food, spending time with, and tutoring the people who can’t leave their rooms after surgery. we took turns sleeping on the floor of the hospital while friends were staying there in case they needed to go to the bathroom or had an emergency overnight, someone was also there all day.

we really take care of each other. and everyone’s so genuine. getting to see that part of everyone come out was amazing. the disasters that it took to bring those things out were unfortunate to say the least.

well, i meant to write a different post but this is what you got. oh well oh well. all in all everyone’s well.

and i’ve already graduated.

in the beginning i was much more strenuous of a student. which sounds better in chinese. renzhen. i was much more renzhen. now i’m just…tired. literally, - not tired of things, i just literally want to sleep. i want to sleep all the time here though. something’s not right in this city. 4 hospitalizations and 2 surgeries in 7 weeks?

i think it might be getting up at 6 everyday - and then even earlier on weekends. we never get a break. 2 free days in 2 months. i didn’t realize how badly i need weekends to catch up.

we have 4 final exams tomorrow morning. in a lot of ways i’m excited to be going home. idk this is a weird part of life.

i don’t think i can take much more of the food here. we ordered a pizza tonight for dinner and it was the healthiest thing i’ve eaten in a while. china’s food can be ridiculously oily all over, but this city’s speciality is being the most oily in all of china. i will miss excessively dangerous boating rides though.

alright i’m gonna go shower. have to be somewhere in a bit. we have to wash our own laundry here - by hand - and i do wash them i swear but i feel like i always smell.. ok that’s all for now.