Today is a sad day. Morgan has to go back today, but I keep reminding myself how good it has been to see her over the last few days. I only have 28 days until I go back home – exactly 4 weeks from the day that Morgan leaves.
We roll out of bed around 8:00. I have been trying to email my teachers and tell them that I’m not going to come to class today, on account of Morgan being here and this being our last day together. I sent them an email yesterday afternoon, and they never got back to me. I know that they saw my email, but I am interpreting their silence as acknowledgement of my plan. They can’t technically let us skip class, and they are assenting to my plan by their silence. At lest I hope they are. After getting ready, we took our bags over to my dorm.
Morgan packed up for the trip back to the States, and after about an hour of checking plane information, packing, and me sending some stuff back with her, Morgan was completely ready for the trip back.
We were getting hungry, so we stopped by the noodle restaurant from the first day. I ordered two stir-fried noodle dishes for us to share, along with a bottle of red tea. The meal was good, as always in the noodle restaurant.
From there, we rode over to Carrefour. Morgan needed to have the experience of going to a Chinese grocery store before she went back home. If these journals (and the emails floating around entitled “Chinese grocery store – This is crazy!”) haven’t convinced you that Chinese grocery stores are above and beyond normal, then please allow me to elaborate. These stores are consistently filled beyond capacity with shoppers, buying everything from live frogs, live fish, raw beef and pork, dried seaweed, pickled and partially fermented vegetables, shredded dried beef, every nature of dried fruit and vegetable, tea by the bagful, frozen dumplings, yogurt in gallon containers, yogurt in little baggies, BBQ chicken-flavored Pringles, green tea Oreos, Black People Toothpaste… It is an experience that you need to see for yourself. I took Morgan on the grand tour, and we stocked up on some snacks to send back to the States. I also have quite a list of other snacks to bring back. Put in your orders, dear readers.
After making our purchases, we were waylaid by the beggars adorning Carrefour, trying to get our receipt. I made Morgan hold the receipt, but they were, sadly, rather tame today in asking for the receipt. Sometimes when I leave 3 or 4 beggars will attack at once, while all sorts of shoppers push you and get ad at you for clogging up the entrance. We then rode over to see Purple Bamboo Park.
Purple Bamboo Park appears to be a rather new park, meaning that is was constructed the last century. The main attraction of the park is a giant system of man-made lakes, along with huge landscaping projects surrounding the lakes. As Beijing sits in the middle of a desert, irrigation in a park like that is critical. When one begins to look at the scope of the park itself and the amount of greenery therein, the difficultly in designing an irrigation system becomes apparent. And seeing as how complex this system is, it frequently malfunctions. What to do? You can send men out with a small pump attached to a water hose, put the pump into the lake, and there you have a man-made irrigation system.
Other than the logistical attractions that the park offers, there are a number of interesting pavilions throughout the park, where you might find people necking, playing cards, playing chess, or practicing a musical instrument. We also walked through a rather creepy-looking amusement park in the park (a park inside a park, ahh!). It reminded me of the Scooby-Doo video game where you run around the haunted amusement park. We also found the section of the park were people like to dance in the early afternoon. You could observe old people turning slowly in small circles, middle-aged couples performing ballroom dancing, Western line-dancing, and a group of middle aged women simply strutting across the dance floor. I was confused, to say the least.
We came back to the dorm and did one last check of the room. It was time to head out. The subway was terribly crowded on every line, and we had to force our way into the trains with the baggage. Morgan says that I once ran over this lady’s foot with her 40-pound bag. These things, they happen in the Beijing subway. People have come to expect it.
We said goodbye at the airport line, and both of us shared a few tears. It will only be a month’ we’ve done that before, we kept saying. I took the subway back to the dorm, feeling deflated.
I was still feeling pretty deflated when I got back to the dorm and got caught up on our classes for the morrow. I pushed through, and after working for about 2 hours, it was time to go to Bally. I had to try out my new running shoes. Analysis: I approve.
It was closing in on 10:00 when I finally ate some supper at Ma Lan. I felt like I was about to bonk and was very glad to get some food in my system. When I got back to the dorm, I wrote an essay about apocalyptic literature for my Chinese class the next day. I was certain that the essay was the worst that I had written the semester. I just wrote, not looking at new sentence structures that we’d learned, not inserting any new vocabulary, not bothering to edit it.
Then, it was time for some much-needed sleep.
I’ll write soon!
Jamey
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