Chun Jie and Senioritis

As if immersing myself in Chinese isn’t hard enough to keep my blog up to date, I went and caught Senioritis. Symptoms include drowsiness, lack of motivation, becoming complacent, and unnecessary math to see what you need to test to keep your grades above a B+ level, (it’s A’s.) But after fighting that off and possibly parasites, I’m back with lackluster prose. Hooray!
***
Chun Jie is the biggest holiday in China, School gets let out and everyone heads home. Not their home in Beijing, their laojia, their hometown. Their roots. Shen laoshi tells me that when Chun Jie comes around he just goes to the train station and watches the madness, as the millions of immigrant workers, and people who moved from elsewhere go home. There is literally no room in the train station, if you want to wait for your train, you or someone you know will probably be forced to stand in a bathroom. One stall holds 16 people according to research done by Shen laoshi. Hilarity ensues at the train station, but for me and the rest of School Year Abroad, we have a week before we’re on Chun Jie. I’ll deal with that next week. Instead of returning to Liaoning with my host family this weekend, I was invited by Peter’s roommate at school, Mark, to go to dinner to celebrate the start of the break, as well as Mark’s acceptance to go live with Americans for about a month. Mark, Peter, Chris and I go way back to Shiyi in October, so Chris was also invited to the meal. We drove to a place within the second ring road and soon arrived at an “A” ranked restaurant at 12:00. Mark was waiting outside of the restaurant, wearing fake glasses, which for some odd reason or another is a fad among students in China. Mark is a tall Chinese kid. He’s a tenth grader, but about six feet tall. The lot of us walked up into the restaurant, past the normal seating, to an elevator in the back, which took us to the top floor of the restaurant. There were rooms with just one table to the room and Mark’s father had reserved one of them. We greeted each other and sat down at the table and talked for a while. We were discussing what had happened in the past two months, when two waiters walked in and held a fish head that weighed about 15 kilos in front of us, showing us what we were going to have sometime during the lunch. They began to bring in food, little tastes of heaven, and we continued our conversations, which became political… and occasionally politically incorrect. Chris and I being college going seniors advised the table on what had to be done in the future for Peter and Mark. Laughs were intermittent throughout the conversation. Dishes kept pouring in; beef cooked on hot rocks in a boiling pot, cabbage, sizzling steaks, the fish head came back submerged in sauce that gave off the appearance that it was back in the lakes in Zhejiang province and swimming around. There was spicy doufu, fruit sculptures, xiao chi (snacks,) more vegetables, pumpkin soup and the feast kept going. We were asked about American habits for Mark’s imminent departure, but ended up explaining that America is a country of immigrants and all the habits aren’t the same. We looked at our watch and four hours had passed since we set out for the restaurant. And as we looked up from our watches, in the middle of the conversation, Mark’s mother said, let’s go and we were gone, driving back to Xinjiekouwai from Xinjiekounei. The difference in the “wai” and the “nei” at the end of the words mean outside and inside respectively, which symbolize where the current street lies in respect to the torn down walls of Beijing, inside or outside the walls. Just a little tidbit I found interesting. We got back to the house, Chris walked up one staircase, my host family and I walked up another and I was off to the massive amounts of homework that I’d put off this weekend. Curses Senioritis… Curses…