Full Circle

You may remember that in the fall, I ended up hosting a birthday party, which was a great experience.  Partly because it was so... typical? of my life in China -- not extremely planned, a lot of people, a lot of craziness, and very memorable.

Right now we are in crunch season.  We finished giving exams on Friday, grades are due on Tuesday, we leave the school next Friday, and are teaching classes this next week.  Add to that mix all of the insanity of packing, cleaning, saying goodbyes and trying to keep investing in relationships, and that is kind of what our lives look like.

Anyway, yesterday my team was doing some stuff in the morning, and in the evening, I was planning that a few girls (read: between 2 and 10) were going to come over and hang out or play games outside.  In the afternoon, I was going to work like crazy on grading and other stuff.  

It was about 4 o'clock and my phone buzzed... and I was a little startled.

"Hey, what's up?" I asked, pulling my phone out from the stack of scribbled-on rubrics.

"Hey, Hannah!  M and G and me want to cook with you tonight, okay?  We'll go to the market in a while to get food."

"Um.... What?  Tonight?  Where are you now?"  I was trying to figure out how this would work with all of the things that I needed to get done and the girls who were already planning to come over.  

"We're playing frisbee outside!"

Right outside of my apartment, in other words.

"Hmm.  Okay, I'm working on some things, but when I finish I will come meet you, okay?"

She called me back about an hour later.  "Come on, we need to go to the market!"

So I went outside, put my stuff in her backpack, and we set off for the market.  It turned out they wanted to make coke chicken and rice, which was a great plan... except that I didn't have coke or chicken or rice.  So we did a good bit of shopping...

Meanwhile I was texting my girls to find out who was planning to come.  (Turned out that it was only two of them...)

Also, meanwhile...

Gr:  *on the phone* "Hello?  E?  Oh, okay!"  *to me*  "E is going to bring two of his classmates too."

We came back to campus with a lot of food and everyone hung out or helped cook (or drafted someone else to help them cook), and then we ate... sat around and talked... there was a lot of joking about different dialects/accents in China.  It was fun...

And definitely not what I had planned for yesterday.  

Hospitality in China looks very different than what it does in America.  I wouldn't really expect six people to essentially invite themselves over to cook.  I wouldn't expect two of them to be girls who I had never met before.  I still don't exactly expect it in China... but it doesn't surprise me the same way that it did at the beginning of the year.

I love living here...