To Home and Back

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I went home for two months in the summer. It was rather bland and uneventful but I didn't mind. I did some short traveling though, D.C for a few days to stay with a close friend and I rode my motorcycle from West Virginia to North Carolina, via a short section of the Blue Ridge Parkway. As I was in D.C, one of the largest and most expensive cities in America I felt something was missing. I had traded chickens in the street for shoe shine stands, gone from chaos to orderly. It felt..well...boring. I had been raised around order and shoe shine stands so chaos and loose chickens is still far more exciting. I said to myself if I walk in that bar I know all I'll get is an over priced drink and conversation about politics, weather, or someone's work with a dividend swap. I knew I wouldn't meet the owner and play basketball together on the weekend or get invited to a wedding of someone I didn't even know. I know its mostly because here I am the interesting foreigner but you see where I'm going with this. That's the fun unpredictably random stuff that could happen anytime on the other side of the world.





I enjoyed my time at home and didn't get agitated at being under the same roof as my parents again, unlike most 20 somethings who move back home for a bit. In the back of my mind I knew I would be leaving again for China so I valued the time at home. Some perspectives on family have changed after seeing how closely Chinese people regard family. The thought of helping my parents out monetarily later in life never crossed my mind. Not that its a burden or pressure but now I think, yeah, I hope I make enough money to make their life easier like they did for me. I don't think they're gonna be moving in with me the way Chinese parents do, but you gotta crawl before you walk right?





After saying goodbye to the Mountain State, I and my colleagues met up in Shanghai. We had lunch in the Pearl Tower, saw a Chinese acrobat show similar to Cirque du Soleil and the hotel stay was all care of Henan JiaoYu XueYuan for last year's “dedicated” work.





It felt good to be back in Zhengzhou, the ol' stomping ground. The school is remodeling our city apartments so until the first week of October we are relegated to living at the new school amongst the corn. One of the other teachers stumbled upon a private non-profit orphanage ran by Americans here in Zhengzhou so earlier in the week we volunteered to play with the kids for an afternoon. We took 8 kids to a nearby park and the kids were great. All of the children at the orphanage have some type of medical problems (the reason they were abandoned) but about half of the kids we saw have already been adopted by American parents and are just waiting for all the paperwork and government stuff to go through. They are doing an awesome thing there, check them out at swallowsnestzz.org.





The first week of October I have off for Chinese National Day and I'm planning on traveling to the coastal city of Qingdao. Germans somewhat colonized the city in the 1890s so there should be an interesting mix of east and west. We all know what the German's do when they set up camp...build a brewery. Tsingtao Brewery, China's largest and most well known brewery is located in Qingdao.

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Photos

Me and Gan
my didi (little brother) for the day