Goodbye, U.S.A. and Ni Hao, China

We left the US on August 28^th and we arrived in Beijing on August 30^th. What? Yes, we lost an entire day upon crossing the International Date Line.

While in Beijing, the novelty had already begun. As we walked across the long halls of the Beijing Airport, we received a little more than a couple of stares (or a lot of stares). Jessie, our Dragons instructor, reassured us and said that in China, it wasn’t considered rude to stare, and that frankly, we were a strange sight for them. While there, we all played a card game called Tarot, a game which we would play very often as a group in the weeks to come. While we were playing, a couple with a child was staring at us blatantly. The man came up to us and asked if he could take a picture of all of us with his little girl. We all felt a mix of awkwardness, but acquiesced nonetheless. When the little girl came towards us,however she started crying and the picture was never realized.

After waiting for a couple of hours in Beijing, the plane headed to Kunming finally arrived. It would take another four hours to get to Kunming and upon hearing that, I felt uneasy. I had never before experienced any sensation like claustrophobia, but I would imagine it feels somewhat like what I felt during that fourteen-hour ride: a forlorn sense of desperation as your mind cries out for rescue from the unbearable tedium(yes, it was very dramatic). I was mentally preparing myself before takeoff and attempting to call forth sleep, so that the tedium would be bearable when the man next to me introduces himself. I also introduce myself with the little bit of Chinese I know and he asks me to sit next to him. The gesture makes me feel welcomed (and slightly uneasy just because that doesn’t happen very often in the US) and though we both have elementary knowledge of each other’s language, we were still able to talk for almost the entire four hours. He told me a little bit about himself. He is from Sichuan, but works in Beijing and was heading to Kunming to visit a friend and his sister. He also had a meeting the next day, so after a while I tried assuring him it wouldn’t be rude of him to go to sleep. He eventually did, but not before he taught me a couple of phrases in the Sichuanese dialect and some animal names from a kids’ show that was playing. Upon arrival to Kunming, we headed to the Lost Garden Guest House, and without any resistance, collapsed under sleep’s unrelenting hold.