This weekend I had the pleasure of going to a cross-cultural wedding. A young Aussie man I met in my first months in China just married the lovely Chinese girl he fell in love with four years ago. I do mean with. They were smitten with one another from the first. He was walking around the town square and watched some models and later met them and a friend who was with them. He thought the friend was much more beautiful and I agree. She’s gorgeous! Most of his courting was courtship of her strict and conservative father but his persistence paid off and now his love and he are man and wife.
My four hour train journeys there and back show the good side of China. On my journey from Wuhan I sat opposite a pretty student and we chatted easily until she reached her home town and got off. She is going to go to an Australian University soon and we talked about differences between being a student in
On my way home I had a conversation with a teacher. This man is about to retire and had learned English by himself, because he wanted to. He teaches Chinese. His comprehension was good and he made no mistakes in anything he said in English. It was another nice journey and we offered each other food. Both of us politely refused. Next to me was another English student but she studied the whole way because she had an exam in the afternoon. There were two early primary school girls near me. One of them was shy and hid every time I looked at her and the other was confident and did a lot of things to amuse the passengers. Her mother just beamed whenever she did a little dance or sang a little song. All the passengers who could see her had smiles on their faces. That mother understands how not to repress her child.
That’s the sort of stuff that keeps me here.