I'll have a Beijing trip with a side order of character development, please
Xi'an was a blast solely in the sense of camaraderie - spending a total of 24 hours in a sleeper train with five others, and an entire weekend of irrelevant hilarity and irritation in equal measure will do great things to a group of new friends. A chronic introvert I am and possibly always will be, but here in Beijing there's an inherent sociability to my daily existence - after group classes and group coffee breaks, there's the group lunch, and the group studying, and the group afternoon activity (viz., back massages, black market shopping, badminton), and the group dinner and the occasional group drinking and clubbing. Alone time is spent in my room, and even then my adorable Korean roommate insists on filling any silence with appalling Korean TV soaps, cookery shows and Pop Idol.
A marked difference to my existence back in England, characterized by hours spent turning within my own mind in the silence of my cosy room on Norfolk Street, but I'm sure there's a balance somewhere - or perhaps one should live life as though one has but six weeks to consume one's context, to pause in the moment and breathe in the fleeting abandon. Perhaps it's healthier.
or perhaps I've just been remarkably fortunate in discovering friends who make such an existence possible - and desirable.
I've a story to tell about a certain girl who came on the Xi'an trip (blonde, whiny, rude, carries a Chanel bag, sports a grotesquely ornate manicure, refuses to eat Chinese food despite being in China, orders besotted minions to carry her bags for her, refuses to speak a jot of mandarin despite supposedly being a student of it, wants to be an actress, lies about her life story, EXPECTS THE WORLD TO REVOLVE AROUND HER), but it borders mightily on bitching, so I, um, won't.
PS: Received an email from my dad with a scanned letter attached, and for the past few days all I've been doing is mentally salivating over how many books a hundred pounds can buy.
