Lil Minnesota Comes to China

Saying goodbye to friends and family before leaving to live in another country for an extended period of time can be very difficult, but saying goodbye to your girlfriend can be even more difficult.  Friends and family will always be there for you when you return, but can the person that you are in a relationship with do the same?  Long distance relationships tend to have very low success rates, but on the positive side, that is the only kind of relationship that I have known with my girlfriend Jessica (Jess).  Ever since we started dating our relationship was a long distance one.  She went to college four hours away from mine and her home in Shoreview, MN is four hours away from my home in Ashland, WI.  Every time we got together we would go on a trip somewhere or put together an itinerary to maximize our stay with each other.  Now since I have moved even farther away to live in China, our relationship has really been put to the test.  We would have to go three and a half months before we could be together again.  So we made travel arrangement for her to come and visit me so we could travel around China together.  Finally the day of her arrival, December 14th had finally come around and I needed to go to Chongqing to pick her up at the airport.

Going to the airport by myself was going to be interesting.  I had to take one of the last busses leaving Beibei to Chongqing, get off at a specific bus stop, and then find a taxi to take me to the airport.  A Chinese friend of mine taught me a couple of useful phrases to help me along my journey, such as “Driver please tell me when we have arrived at Jia Zhou Hua Yuan”.  Eventually I arrived at the airport but had four hours of waiting to do before she would arrive, so in the meantime I camped out in the airport’s KFC to eat a snack and played games on my laptop.  Finally, at 1:45am, she walked through the terminal where she found me waiting (if you want to know the romantic details just ask Jess or me in person).  Getting back to Beibei was quite the journey too.  We had to take a bus to a specific bus stop to catch a taxi to bring us back to Beibei.  We arrived back at my apartment at 2:30am. 

Finally our China adventure together had begun and with the starting point being in Beibei.  I still had a week of teaching to do (finals week) when Jess arrived but this gave her a good opportunity to experience where I lived and get a little bit more acclimated to being China before we departed.