The longest day

Today started like any other day. Let me rephrase that. Today started like any other day would if you got up at 4 in the morning. Poorly. I mean, even my dad waits till 4:30, and that’s saying something.

The rents accompanied me to the airport security checkpoint, and I must say, neither one made a scene, I was quite proud. The flight to Chicago went by cleanly. Turns out Jason’s flight was delayed by half an hour, so I had plenty of time to look around the terminal for who I hoped I would be sitting next to. Sadly, the options weren’t too amazing, which I found strange as Chicago women are one of the best looking groups of people I’ve ever seen or heard of. Don’t say you know better unless you’ve been there.

Our flight ended up being delayed by almost 2 hours, and I was super duper bored.

Somehow my Tylenol PM slipped out of my bag after I packed it, but thankfully the guy next to me had some(it was packaged mom, don’t get upset). I got 4 hours of sleep early on and then watched tv shows I had downloaded for the rest of the 14 hour plane trip. Numbs the brain, but not having them would have been infinitely much worse.

We got ripped off big time by the cab driver from the airport, but he had a sweet car and his A/C was cranked up, so 60 bucks for a 1.5 hour cab ride split between two people seemed like a worthy choice, especially because it was 99 degrees Fahrenheit and humid. It was like Satan’s cruel twist on a swimming pool.

We arrived at our dorm, only to find that the lady at the front desk couldn’t help us get a room, and that we would need to call a certain number tomorrow during business hours to get one. She gave us the address of a nearby hotel and sent us our merry(translation: pissed off) way. The hotel is fine, we are sharing a room, nothing new there. Two beds, A/C, a water cooler with no outlet that fits the plug it has, and there is also a power strip that doesn’t fit in the wall either, don’t think about that too hard or you’ll be heading down aneurism ally.

We changed out of our sweat filled clothes, and set out with goals of:

1) Buy a bike

2) Use bike to get to cell phone store

3) Use bike to get to muslim noodle shop

4) Park bike at the dorm and walk back to the hotel

This isn’t exactly how it happened, the bike shop was closed, so it went more like this:

1) walk to bike store only to be utterly disappointed(bike store is farthest point from everything but worth the walk if you are actually going to get a bike)

2) walk to cellphone store(it’s a 20 min walk from the bike shop) and sweat my balls off only to find out that that was closed too.(Most things don’t close before 10PM in china so these were strange coincidences

3) sweat more more more

4) Eat delicious piping hot noodles which while delicious are just adding to my core body temperature. I actually started lifting my shirt up so it would expose my stomach and upper chest, and leaving it there. It’s a Chinese thing and it looks pretty stupid, but you feel better almost instantly.

5) Bought dvds

a. Got the fifth season of curb your enthusiasm and 300 for about 3 dollars total

6) Got an hour foot massage for 2 dollars and forgot about all that pointless walking I did earlier.

After that we headed back to the hotel to watch a movie and fall asleep. Jason is already asleep as I’m finishing this blog, that sure didn’t take long.

Walking these streets again was really sort of like dreaming. I’ve thought about this place so much over the passed 9 months, that while most of my memories in are spot on, the feel seems a little different, so it has this ethereal aura to it all. Maybe that will go away as I’m here longer, but I hope not, I can’t wipe this smile off my face for the life of me.