The Last Weekend

On Wednesday it was Jin's last night before she had to leave, so we all went out together to TGI Friday's and then afterwards there was this foreign student band playing at D-22 that Jacqui wanted to go to but when I got there they were done playing so we just walked home and got ice cream.

Thursday after class I went shopping on a fairly successful mission to buy things with silly English on them. It was a zillion degrees, and I ate like 3 ice cream cones over the course of the afternoon. Ice cream is like nature's air conditioning! Ahaha don't be surprised if I've gained weight this semester.

Thursday night (I think this was Thursday night; my memories are really muddled) I went out to dinner with Jacqui and Pei and Casey and we went for Xinjiang food, which was pretty tasty. The best part was when I was taking a big drink of water and out of nowhere I sneezed this MONSTROUS sneeze and I covered my mouth with my hand but it still didn't prevent me from kind of spraying Casey and Pei and it was so funny (that might sound mean but seriously it was pretty hilarious) and I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe or swallow or talk I just had to laugh because it was soooo out of nowhere plus Jacqui was laughing (of course she was laughing, she didn't get sprayed) and when Jacqui laughs I can't help laughing too. Later that night we went to Pepper, which is kind of a chilling and chatting place, but if you're my CIEE friends then after a while you get tired of chilling and start dancing around everywhere and
making the fuwuyuan bemused and slightly uncomfortable, because what do you do with a horde of silly dancing people? Pepper has the best fuwuyuan; they're really friendly and adorable. Hen hao!

On Friday I don't even know what I did during the day...some packing, maybe? My schedule has been so weird recently that I'm all jumbled up. The only thing I can recall is that for dinner we went to Korean barbecue. Our table ordered a whole pig and a whole cow, and that was only like half of it. It's a really meat-heavy kind of food, but it's pretty fun because you grill it yourself on a griddle over this pit of hot coals that's set into the table. Mmmm. After dinner, we all went out to Studio 54, which is a club that was previously owned by Sue-Li's uncle, so her uncle has guanxi (read back a few posts if you forgot what that means) with the current owner, which allowed Sue-Li to pull some strings to arrange a special party for CIEE and co. A whole bunch of CIEE students and friends went, and for 100 kuai we could have all sorts of unlimited beverages, and we could bring our own music if we wanted to listen to something special and it was a pretty nice deal. We danced and played and drank and played and danced until around 2 am, when the unlimited-drinks-for-CIEE deal ended and we all went back to Pepper to hang out with our favorite fuwuyuan. They are the best! The one fuwuyuan Sky who is my particular pal was trying to teach me how to do that thing where you open a fan all in one swoop by flicking your wrist, and at first I kept getting it wrong and just throwing the fan at the floor by accident but then I learned how to do it right and now I use it to impress all my friends, hen hao!

We were at Pepper until really late, and then Eva and I decided we were hungry for sandwiches so when everyone else went home around 5:30 am we went to Lush (the American restaurant that's conveniently open 24/7) for like another hour and we ran into other CIEE students there and me and Eva and Sue-Li were there until like 6:30 or so and then we finally got a cab home but I didn't go to sleep because my roommate was leaving the next morning at 11 so I stayed up and talked to her and then went to sleep for like an hour and a half before waking up to help her with her luggage and send her off. I gave Quynh a little present as she was leaving and she was like you little jerk you know how huge my luggage is already! Mahahaha I'm sneaky like that. For reasons I don't recall, I didn't go to sleep after Quynh left either. I think I packed? I think the sleep deprivation has been affecting my memory. The remaining people on my hall all went out together for dim sum in the afternoon, which was delicious. The best part ever was when we ordered chicken feet and it was Vanessa's first time trying them and she would take a teeny little nibble and then make little whimpering noises and in the end she ate like 3 molecules of it and was like okay someone else can have the rest. If you've never had chicken feet before, they're not bad or anything, but they don't really have any meat on them. You just kind of eat the skin and then spit out the bones. It's a silly food.

Saturday afternoon I took a much-needed nap, and in the evening we went out to a super-fancy restaurant where the menu was all, like, lobster and truffle ravioli in a red pesto sauce and such. We got amazing gourmet food and a bottle of champagne because it was everybody's last night and it still only ran everybody $20-something American, on average. China rules. During dinner, the electricity went out for no reason, and it was kind of cool because the light was just from the candles on all the tables, and everybody was kind of confused, but we pretended like the lights were out on purpose and started singing Happy Birthday (you know like when they turn out the lights to sing Happy Birthday so you can see the candles on the cake), not that it was anybody's birthday, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. The waiters wished John a Happy Birthday on the way out, so I guess we were credible. Then we went and got mango ice cream! It was fabulous.

Saturday night was a lot more chill, because everyone was really tired and still had to finish packing and we just wanted to hang out with each other. We spent a while exchanging pictures from the semester and watching videos that we had taken back in the beginning. Jacqui, Pei, Richard, and I filmed our own little video that night - it was a commercial for skin whitening cream and it turned out kind of awesome. I'll see if I can post it on YouTube later. Pei played the part of the Chinese girl who is sad about her yellow skin, Richard played Pei's husband, Jacqui played a dermatologist, I played post-skin-whitener Pei, and a tube of sweetened condensed milk played the skin whitening cream. I was the only person who didn't end up getting condensed milk smeared on my face at any point, haha! Sleep deprivation will make you do these kinds of things.

I stayed up basically all night Saturday night as well because I didn't want to miss any hanging out with everybody, since they were all leaving Sunday morning. I only slept for one hour, from 5:30-6:30, and during that time Pei and Julie left! Boo. Fortunately they're just going to Hong Kong for a couple days and then coming back to Beijing some more. Hen hao!

CIEE had a bus leaving for the airport at 10:20 Sunday morning, so basically everybody left then or before then. An hour or two before the bus was leaving, Vanessa couldn't find her passport, and she was freaking out but we both prayed that it would turn up, and I was calling the last places where she had remembered taking it but they weren't answering and it wasn't turning up anywhere around her room but finally she found it in some random bag of papers that was packed away in her luggage and it was such a relief. People left soooo much stuff behind in the end, it was ridiculous. Paul gave me his speakers, which made me pretty happy because they're so much better than my tinny little computer speakers, so I'll have 20 days of good-quality music listening then I'll probably pass them on to some CIEE summer students or something. Share the love!

So Sunday morning half past ten the last of CIEE got on the bus and left for the airport, leaving just me and Matt, who accidentally booked a flight for Monday, and Richard, who isn't CIEE. We got a little lunch together and then I moved out too. Richard and I just took my stuff to my new apartment on foot (in retrospect maybe I should have gotten a taxi but I don't know how to approach my apartment by car because the walking route isn't driveable) and he went off to do homework and I was all by myself unpacking because my roomie was in Xi'an for the weekend.

Sunday night I was supposed to go out to dinner with Jon from my Kouyu class and other Kouyu classmates Saki and Maki and Saki's roommate because it was Jon's last night in Beijing, but it was Matt's last night too so him and Richard came along and Jon's friends came too but his friends wanted to eat somewhere far away but Matt had to be back on campus before too late to see his Chinese friend one last time so I wanted to eat close by and by the time Jon and his friends arrived we had already been waiting for a table at a Japanese restaurant and one had just freed up, but then they got angry and didn't want to eat Japanese and Jon and Saki and I just all wanted to eat together and be happy but there was no way to make everybody happy so I just ate at the Japanese place with Richard and Matt and everybody else went to the other place and I just went to meet up with them afterwards. We hung out by their restaurant for a little bit and then went once again to Pepper, where the fuwuyuan all greeted me like an old friend since I've been there like every night recently and I showed them my improved fan-opening skills and they were impressed and Sky showed us how to do a little magic trick with straws and it was a nice time but when it came time to leave and say goodbye to Jon, Saki started to cry a little, and today in Kouyu class we were talking about our weekends like we do every Monday and when it got to the part where Saki was telling about Jon leaving she started to cry again and I had managed to hold it together during all of the weekend's goodbyes but when Saki started crying in Kouyu it all just hit me that everyone was gone and I lost it too. I've met so many amazing people this semester and I just wish I had more time with them...I know we all live in the same country but America is so big and we're all so far apart and we'll never all be together again. Bu hao :( At least Pei and Julie and Kim and Casey are coming back to Beijing after they travel for a couple days, so I won't be totally CIEE-less for the rest of my time here...