Quarantine is (knock on wood) OVER!! :) This weekend I escaped, spent all of Friday in Guiyang with some of the other volunteers and we went to a really great coffee shop/bar that had (who knew?!) an American DJ (he was a former Peace Corps China volunteer during SARs who never left), really great lighting and music, expensive imported beer (but we got discounts!), and was just such a welcome change! After that placed closed around midnight, we went to another bar, had more fun, and then I stayed at Kim's house in order to combat the curfew and night bus in Longdongbao.
On Saturday, then, I commuted to Huaxi (a subdivision of Guiyang, like Longdongbao, only very classy and upscale; the complete opposite of Longdongbao, actually) to visit Dave, another volunteer, at GuiDa. The two of us had a "grading homework party" at a coffee shop (his school has coffee shops on campus!), ate delicious food all day long, relaxed, got caught up with one another, and then I spent all today, Sunday, just enjoying being able to take short-distance walks without much of a limp or pain or the confines of our campus walls. :)
This afternoon I was contacted by Claire, my good friend from training in Chengdu, and we decided that she and all of the other girls (except Melanie) that I traveled with to Yunnan over winter vacation are going to meet back up in Kunming, Yunnan for a reunion this weekend, since we have Thursday and Friday off. I couldn't be more excited! My dear friend/foreign teacher at my school, Miah, is even going to come to meet my Peace Corps friends! On Sunday, after returning from Kunming, I was invited to go on a day trip (for free) to go white water rafting, which sounds so stellar, if it really is what it was described to us as (we're going with a bunch of Chinese people we just met; they're friends of our friends). Really, after multiple weeks of hellish repression, it seems like I'm just being overwhelmed by great happenings! This coming weekend will be Kunming and the rafting trip, the weekend following I'm going camping with a bunch of volunteers in a cave in Anshun, then the following weekend we have "sports week" so there are no classes on Thursday or Friday of that week so that the students can participate in competitive sports, so I'll do something fun, then, too. Finally! :) I feel like my shoulders alone just lost (at least!) 5 lbs of stress.
Life is really good again. :)
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