Alex

Amanda Shortall, my my, what can I say? We met last year in Beijing, and she's one of those persons that you just can't... not like. I fell for her immediately. When we said goodbye last year, the same morning I was leaving (we had a final goodbye breakfast at the hostel roof before she left for school), she said: "Well, guess I'll see you in five years or something." We truly did believe that we would see eachother again, and that it would take many years before we did so. But things don't always turn out the way you expect it to. We'll see eachother again in 11 days, just a little bit more than a year later. Amanda is now once again in Beijing, working there over the summer. She is the reason why I'm going to China two weeks earlier than I had originally planned. We will have a week together in Beijing before she goes back to the U.S. I had to go earlier, it would have been so silly if I would arrive just a couple of days after she'd left.

She has been my breakfast company each weekday morning the past couple of weeks, we talk over MSN Messenger every day. (You can't have much to do at work girl, considering how much we talk.) She just makes my day, she is so sweet! And how can you not like a girl who eats scorpions on a stick?

"I love your blog. You sound like me a lot of the time, and it makes me happy to have met you. (Not that I wasn't already.) It's just always funny to think that there you are living life and there might be so many other people out there that share some of your same thoughts, living anywhere in the world. And maybe, if you are extra lucky, you go to a hostel and some Swedish girl starts speaking to you in Chinese at a bar one night and you end up with a friend." /Amanda

One evening in Beijing last year, this new-found friend of mine decided that I was going to have dinner with one of her friends. She was going to a dinner party and told me that I should join her later in Sanlitun, a street edged with bars, most frequently visited by westerners. This friend of hers was also joining her later, so she fixed us up for a dinner. She didn't have a cellphone, which I had (I was only there for three weeks, but I got myself a Chinese cellphone number the first thing I did, no one else did.). We decided that she would call me when she was done with her dinner, and then we would go and meet her at Sanlitun. When we finished dinner we went back to the hostel and drank beer on the hostel roof, waiting for her phonecall. We sat down with some random people, like you do in a hostel. It doesn't really matter that you don't know eachother, or that you just met one or two times before, you just sit down and get to know eachother. By the time Amanda called, we had convinced two of the guys to come with us.

The confusion was complete when we arrived to Sanlitun. It's not a small street, there seem to be no such ting as a small street in Beijing, and we hadn't decided exactly where to meet up. Amanda actually called me from her taxi-drivers cellphone and asked me where we were, I had only been there one time before, and didn't really know, so she gave the taxi-driver the phone, and we tried to figure out where she should get off. In chinese. Right. That didn't really work out, to be honest, so we walked around looking for her for quite a while. All of a sudden we just bumped into her, it was sheer luck.

We went to Kai, the bar where me and Amanda had first met by coincidence, like every other meeting in China that got stuck in my heart. So many things would have turned out differently if the coincidents would have been different. I like my Beijing coincidents. I like the coincidents of that night at Kai. We didn't plan to stay there, but it started raining. A lot. "What the heck", we thought, "We'll just wait until it stopped raining." That seemed to be a thought shared by everyone else at Kai. The trouble was that it didn't stop raining. We got stranded. The bar was cramped with people, no one left for several hours because of the rain.  

Me, I love rain. The heavier the better, especially when it's summer and the air is warm. I love to sit indoors and watch the rain through the window, listen to the raindrops beating against the glass. What I love the most is to walk in the rain, feel the raindrops against my hair, my face, my bare arms (I'm one of those crazy persons who actually take off my jacket when it starts raining.) And I loved the rain that night. Especially since this bar had windows in the roof, I sat and watched the rain run down the glass from underneath. 

We managed to get hold on a table after a while. Well, actually, Amanda managed to get hold on a table for us, by yelling (in Chinese, you gotta respect that, she had only studied Chinese for 6 weeks or something) at some poor guy belonging to the staff for not giving us the table they had promised us.

There was a lot of people who sat down with us, I don't know where they came from. Amanda seemed to know some of them. We spend hours and hours in those couches, drinking, talking laughing, (taking pictures with Amandas camera. We were both trying to make silly faces, how come she looks cute while I look... well... I can't even find words for it. Let's just say that I succeeded where she failed. Ssseeeexyyy!) She send me a bunch of pictures from this evening earlier today, nothing like photographs to make you nostalgic.

I think it was about 3 A.M. when the rain stopped that night. The street outside Kai was covered in two inches of water when we left. Amandas friend let her piggyback ride him and carried her over the flooded street. I looked at the big boy by my side and asked him if he was going to be a gentleman about it. He was, and me and Amanda both arrived to the hostel with dry feet, unlike the rest of our company. (Can you believe that? I actually asked a man to carry me over the water. You do strange things when you've spend several hours at a bar.)

That, my friends, was a great night. And this is a very long text. I always feel a bit uncomfortable when I write these long long looong texts, as if you will all have gotten bored by the end of it.

(Is this good enough Amanda? At least you'll have enough reading to amuse yourself until I get online tomorrow. Thanks for the pictures and the nostalgia.)



Love,
Alex

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