Happy Easter Everyone!!!!!
I know it's not yet Easter in America, but it is in China! Well, for the americans living in china it is.
My group and I were supposed to go to Ningbo this weekend. It's about a 12 hour train ride from Hefei...I know, not fun. There is another school in Ningbo that our Head Master wanted to take us too. She wanted us to meet some of the kids and play with them. Also, an added bonus...our school was going to pay for us to go! It was our FREE vacation. They told us Ningbo wasn't good for shopping but it was a beautiful city. We were all mainly excited because we didn't have to pay for anything. So our group was supposed to leave last night. We were supposed to be at the train station at 7:45pm. Before we left our apartment aleksi, bethany, cami and myself wanted to run across the street to get some snacks for our trip. We asked karen (our translator) to give us the address to the train station in chinese and we would show it to the taxi driver and meet them there. So the four of us ran across the street and were in the store for maybe 10 minutes...ran outside and hailed down a taxi. We arrived at the train station at 7:25 earlier then we were supposed to. So we waited and waited till about 7:40 and then started getting a little worried. "why can't we find them?" "are we in the right place?" I showed some random asain man ( super cute...might I add) the address and he nodded his head in agreement that we were in fact in the right place. So we divided to try to find them. Aleksi and I waited at where you buy the tickets and bethany and cami waited by where you board the train. After another 10 minutes we still couldn't find them.All four of us were just standing there with not a clue what to do. No one speaks english,we don't have a cell phone, AND our group has our tickets. Since bus stations and train stations are always packed with people they are also packed with bums/beggars asking for money. We were approached by this lady that was just rambling on and on and shoving a cup in our face. She was really quite scary looking so I gave her a yuan and motioned with my hand for her to "go away." She was soo persistant and kept pointing to her dirty hands and THEN she held up a big chunk of her hair. All of us at the same time said " ohhhh....sick!" She wouldn't leave so we decided to start walking away. Then I turned around and this old beggar lady had thrown this massive bag of stuff over her shoulder (like she was santa claus) and started RUNNING after us. So all 4 of us started screaming and hauling it. We ran inside the McDonalds right next to the train station hoping that she wouldn't follow us inside. She didn't.We asked the employees if we could us there phone to call our school,so they could call Karen (who was with our group) and tell them to meet us somewhere. It was now about 8:10 and we finally got ahold of our head master, linda. She told us that our group was on the train and the train had already left. We were stranded. She told us to come back to the school. We arrived back to our rooms and all of us just sat together in quiet so sad that we missed our free vacation. So now it's just us 4 here until tuesday night. Just us for Easter and just us for my birthday (which is the 25th). So today we are making blueberry muffins that aleksi brought from home and having scrambled eggs for our Easter feast. Last night before we went to bed, we all went back to the store and let each other pick out some candy that we will later hide for each other to find. We decided that even though my birthday is on Tuesday we will celebrate it on wednesday (my actual birthday in america). Then everyone will be home for whatever Aleksi planned for me. Anyway, we are all bummed out for sure. We are safe though, from the crazy chunk of hair lady. Love you all! Happy Easter!
-Cort
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