Leaving on a Jet Plane...and then sitting in Newark for 6 hours
During my trip to Shanghai I made the decision to come home about 10 days early. Surprisingly the airline only charged me $75. My reasons for coming home were:
1) I had gone nearly as far as I could go in my Chinese speaking. I needed to go through another year of classes before I went back.
2) Except for the Chinese acrobatics, I had seen pretty much everything I wanted to see.
3) I was starting to get injured. Five weeks of running on concrete finally spelled disaster for my Achilles tendon.
4) I wanted to get back to work and start earning some money instead of spending.
5) And of course, I just missed all my friends and family.

Anyways, after returning to my dorm after Shanghai, Helen picked me up that afternoon and took me to a upscale Japanese restaurant. Most everything on the menu was more expensive than all the food I would pay for in a day--sometimes 3 days. She said it was the top Japanese restaurant in Beijing. I was given free reign to order whatever I wanted--but I tried to keep it reasonable. I did eat sushi that was octopus eggs rather than fish eggs. When we returned to her house Gao Nai Nai (which means Grandma Gao) was chatting with two other Nai Nai. Of course I had to get a picture with the 3 Nai Nai. They were all very nice and quite tickled by the fact that I was talking to them in Chinese. Then I got pictures with Helen--some outside (below), and then some inside with her camera. The scene of us trying to use the timer to get a centered picture was hilarious, as we struggled with it for about 15 minutes. Mr. Wang, her husband, came home later and then we three talked for about 45 minutes about me and my future. They are so nice to welcome me back next summer; and Helen noted how good my timing was. They only became investors in the college a half a year ago. Otherwise, I would not have had a place to stay.

After doing my run the next morning, I got ready and ended up getting to the airport 2 and a half hours before my flight. I got to my gate with 30 minutes to spare. Everything had gone so well I felt like I should break a souvenir just to get the bad moment out of the way. The flight to Newark was fine--I talked away a lot of the time with the lady sitting next to me who was from Newark. She worked in downtown Manhattan and saw the entire sequence of events occur on 9/11. It was really interesting to hear it from someone who had been there. She could actually explain the fear that she felt on that day and how that fear brought people together, of course more so than it did here in Florida or other states. I arrived in Newark, said goodbye to my new friend, went through more security and customs, and got to my gate.

Great. I was an hour and a half early. I wandered around some, and when I came back an hour later I was still an hour and a half early. So I guess I didn't need to break a souvenir. My unlucky moment was going to come in the form of a 6 hour span. Delay after delay came. My flight eventually got bumped back from just after 8:00 to 1:00 a.m. In this span I got so bored I ate my 5th meal of the day. This isn't as bad as it sounds. I'd been awake at this point for about 31 hours, and had slept only an hour on my Beijing flight. During this waiting period I sat next to next to a woman from London. She was trying to go through Newark to St. Louis, and her flight was supposed to leave an hour before mine. We had a sort of competition to see whose flight would be the most delayed and whose would be first to leave. I won the contest. However, while we were sitting there we had an on and off conversation for about 3 hours. One thing she told me about was the London subway bombings a little over a year ago. She told me how she was so scared to go into the center of city, she didn't use the subways or buses for a half a year. What a coincidence: the only two real conversations I had had were with two people who had experienced two of the most recent and major terrorist attacks. Well, eventually she went for a beer, and I went back to watching CNN's coverage of the Mid-East conflict, which I can now give you a full rundown of. Later, an older man took her seat. I asked him where he was from. All he did was point to the TV screen and say, "That mess." He was an Israeli fleeing to Jacksonville. This seemed to seal the deal for a huge coincidence. All three people I had talked with had seen firsthand some sort of terrorism (if you classify Hezbollah as a terrorist group) or crisis.

To me this reinforced a feeling that I have expressed to a few of my friends maybe a year back and more recently. Although George Bush is not popular now, I think the history books will be kind to him. You've got 9/11, mass transit bombings in Madrid in 2004, subway bombings in London, suicide bombings in Iraq, train blasts in Mumbai earlier this month, and the list goes on. Maybe terrorist attacks are what war will be from now on, rather than country vs. country. Maybe we are fighting a necessary war that is affecting the whole world (my Newark, London, and Israeli friends), and maybe it would be a lot worse if we weren't doing something. He's already gotten Saddaam, al-Zarqawi, and although the Iraq situation is unstable, a new democratic government is being formed. Perhaps Bush doesn't have enough time in office to win the war on terrorism, but at least he is initiating the fight, when other countries are either unwilling or unable. After all, we are the most powerful country, and therefore should be held responsible.

With that said, I finally flew back to Jacksonville, and got an hour's sleep on the flight. Man it was good to see my mom. So the final count when I went to sleep at 5:00 a.m. was in 34 hours, only 2 hours of sleep. Awesome.

(By the way, my next post will be my last. I will attempt to make some sort of sense of what I have experienced on my trip.)