Happiness is Relative

This past Wednesday we had our closing lunch.  It was at a restaurant that was across from Wumei and it has a lot of really good recipes.  This closing lunch didn’t have very much in terms of information or anything, but more it was Sister Shen wanting to treat us to lunch so that people could meet her if they hadn’t and to congratulate us on our semester (the next day I was late to class when she was attending because I was getting my scholarship.  When I explained why she was excited that I had gotten a scholarship and so was my teacher).  We took a group picture and Adam Josh and I went to go to a cake place to pick up a cake that Josh had ordered for getting scholarships. When got to the shop, we looked at the cake.  It was originally supposed to have a Buddha on it but instead has 4 flowers and said “Congrats on Scholarships” on it.  We asked to add our names on the top and after he finished we proceeded to tip him for a job well done.  He exclaimed “NoooOOOOOOoooo!!!” and tried to give us our money back but we ran from the shop before he could get around the glass fast enough to give it to us.  The cake was pretty delicious and looked pretty good.  The night before I had pulled my mattress into Josh and Adams room and slept in there.  It was a lot warmer than in my room which never gets over 17 degrees Celsius (I believe that is in the 50-60’s). We had some good pillow talk over those two nights and it was a lot of fun, even though I felt bad that Drew slept in our room alone.

This Friday was the last day of class.  I sat through Kouyu class not really paying attention because it was the last day and could not concentrate and when Hanyu came around we took yet another class picture which would end up being around the 5 one we have taken in the past few weeks.  Josh joined our class this time because he had my Hanyu teacher for his Tingli class and we had given her a Christmas card and wanted to see her reaction.  After this picture our teacher said to us that if we had things that we needed to do we could leave.  Amber stopped us right there.  She wanted to give our teacher the gift from us.  We had pitched in some money to print off some pictures from class and our class parties in a photo book and a large picture of our class in a picture frame.  While doing so they also passed some cards for the four of us that were leaving.  The things that they wrote about us were super kind and it made me miss my classmates a lot even though I hadn’t even left yet.  When I looked back up at Yu Laoshi she was crying.  She told us that it had been a long time since she has received a gift like this in a long time and that she was going to miss us all.  She had to turn away from us to wipe her tears from her eyes.  When she turned back around I ran up to give her a hug and a few others followed suit.  I turned to the rest of the class and told them that I wanted a hug from all of them as well and so everyone filed in line for a hug.

At that point Josh and I left the class and headed to the Pearl Market because he, Adam and I were got to make our way to Tianjin that day and I needed to buy pearls for Jordan.  Adam went to buy the tickets while we bargained for pearls.  Jordan sent me $80 to get as many pearls as I could.  I’d say that his is a job well done! We had bargained for nearly an hour when finally she agreed to 4 Excellent quality single strand white necklaces, 1 mid quality single strand pink/purple necklace, 1 good quality triple strand pink/purple necklace, and 4 Good quality bracelets.  I picked out the clasps and they were making the stuff for us right there in front of us.  Adam had come earlier and explained to us that we only had about 45 minutes until we had to be at the train station and they had just started making them.  Explaining our situation, she recruited the help of 4 other people to help finish them and fined making them in 20 minutes leaving us with 25 minutes to go from that station up 2, transfer, and over 1, and transfer to the train station.  We had made it to the train with 5 minutes to spare.  On our way to Tianjin we went.

The train ride was not that bad.  The only bad thing was that even though it said no smoking on the train, people would go into the space between the cars and smoke out there, leaving the door open which would travel inside the car.  This did not make for a very fun ride, but was made better while chatting with the three men that sat across from us.

When we arrived in Tianjin, it felt like it was a lot warmer then Beijing.  This could not be more wrong.  Remember when I said Lee Eun Won’s present to me hadn’t arrived too soon?  Well this was the thing that made me really glad that I had received it.  We walked outside the station and it was much colder than Beijing.  I was only wearing my thin sweatshirt and one thick one so I was not as bundled as I have been and we spent the next three and a half hours outside.  Why were we going to Tianjin in the first place? Adam had heard that there was a CBA (China Basketball Association) in Tianjin and wanted to catch a came before we left.

We got the directions to where it was supposed to be, took an hour bus ride, and looked around a while.  Something fishy was going on when we were asking people.  There was supposed to be a game that day, yet none of the security or employees knew what we were talking about.  We went to McDonalds, to hotels and got on the internet there too look but all of them kept pointing us back to the same building that no one knew what was going on.  Finally we found someone that knew what was going on.  The CBA game had changed venues and was never updated on the internet.  The company that was helping us told us that if we left right then we could make it using the bus.  The unfortunate thing was that Adam scheduled our return for 9:30 which was when the game was supposed to end.  This was a problem because if we made it to the game we would have to leave about an hour into it.  We decided just to try.

After waiting about 20 minutes in the freezing cold, Adam said “Ok 10 more minutes and we are going back to McDonald’s” while Josh said “3 more buses”.  About 2 minute passed and both of them gave up.  Right then the bus that would take us to the game came and Adam froze.  He really wanted to go see that game, and I’m not sure what changed his mind, but we all continued on to McDonald’s and enjoyed a big meal for about what we would have paid in the States.  At this point we just wanted to get home, so we ran for a bus and got there about 8:25pm.  We debated changing our tickets to the bullet train because the last one took us 2 hours to get to Tianjin, so when we had the opportunity to do that we took it and enjoyed a nice quick 30minute ride back to the school.

Adam and I were discussing the trip down there.  He had said that it didn’t go exactly how he expected it to go.

Me: “What do you mean by expected? Define expected.”

Adam: “Well we didn’t get to do what we went there to do”

Me: “Well if the purpose of the trip was to have fun, I say we succeeded. Just the path to that fun was changed.”

Adam: “Yeah your right, that was fun.”

I didn’t care whether we saw that game or not,. I was just happy to be spending time with my friends, but I knew that Adam really wanted to so I went along with everything because I don’t like other people being disappointed. I honestly went because of the fun that I knew I was going to have.  I always do with the two of them and I knew that it would not be any different.  When we arrived in Beijing and back to our school, we arrived only 15 minutes after we would have been leaving Tianjin originally.  It was just enough time to finish packing and to get a little bit of sleep.  It was definitely one of the highlights of my trip and I would not change it for the world.