over and out.

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..).

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