I’ve spent days thinking about this blog post, and now I’ve spent an hour writing it.
And it didn’t autosave.
Oh the horrors of losing your essay right before you turned it in. The references and the sentences. How can I recreate it?
Well, shoot. I can’t. So here’s what I was trying to say in a nutshell.
I think many failed travel blogs peter out toward the end of the experience because things start to get familiar, routine. Why blog about something that doesn’t seem out of the ordinary? Eating rice with chopsticks, chatting with Brits or Kiwis, talking in Chinese.They all seem ‘normal.’
I remember one of my very first days here, when I was in Wuxi, I was walking around the river with one an older man who taught English or Math or History, and I took out my bright pink camera and took photos ofeverything.The women on bikes, the mountains, the barges filled to capacity:
He told me: “Oh, I remember when I still was taking photos in China. One day you will stop because everything will feel ‘normal.'”
I didn’t believe him.
My good friend, Rebecca, a fellow expat who lived in Seoul, Korea for a year, told me something like, “One day, this place will feel like your home, and the people you are with will be your good friends.”
I didn’t believe her either.
I didn’t understand when the Jacksons told me life would be full of ups and downs, when Professor F and L gave me A Bend in the Yellow River that my life would have similarities, or when my professor, Margo, warned me about the time parents bribed her to give their children A’s in Peru…How could my life in China be like the lives of other expats? But the cliche is true. Living in a foreign country changes you, and I can’t help but wonder what my life would be like if I stayed in Xi’an for another year.
I don’t want to be nostalgic before I even leave, but today I realized something that I have thought while walking along the corner in Charlottesville or the U-district in Seattle or my own neighborhood in Atlanta: I’m going to miss this place.
blondeinxian 