Final Days

I'm writing this in a 24 hour teahouse in Beijing that I often went to over the summer to cram before tests. Teahouses are not serene. They are loud. They are filled with poker and mahjong games, people watching movies, televisions, loud conversations, laughing, etc. I've adopted a "When in Rome..." attitude and am blasting Bob Dylan from my laptop. I'm a pretty big Dylan fan anyway, but maybe because of homesickness I think he sounds better in China than in America. Perhaps to his discredit, I feel the same way about McDonald's.

I had lunch with one of my professors from the summer. Over the summer she was very blunt with students, so I should have mentally prepared myself before talking with her. She told me that, while my Chinese had improved, it hadn't progressed as much as she had expected. I think she was hoping for fluency. Such is life.

To my dismay my coworker and neighbor both gave me gifts on my last day in Shanghai. I hadn't really been expecting that - it didn't happen in Beijing -, so I was caught off-guard and a little embarrassed. My mom had given me Spurs gear to give as gifts, but I confess I began wearing it for basketball when I found that there were few size L people in China. I managed to scrounge up make-shift gifts, but their ad hoc nature was probably obvious. Luckily I've grown used to being inadvertently impolite.

My office gave me 2000 RMB when I left. It was kind of a strange bonus because I only had/have 2 days to spend it. In a way it was nice because I got to go to a market and buy some guilt-free gifts for people (and will probably buy some guilt-free books tomorrow for the plane). I've found that I'm really not a big fan of bargaining anymore. The mock drama of it all is fun, but the bargaining process pretty good at minimizing your consumer surplus, especially when you're a foreigner and merchants peg the range of potential prices by stating much higher starting offers.


Tomorrow afternoon I fly out. I am sure I will miss China, but I'm ready to leave, at least for a while.