Love and Kindness
I feel like just last week I was writing my “Three Months of Thankfulness” blog but suddenly I am writing my “See you in Three Months, Boston” blog. Crazy.
In honor of these last seven months, and the fact that I only have three left, I am going to tell you about the things that I am thankful for now (so basically my favorite things), 4 months later.
Food:
I am still thankful for all of the food that I was 4 months ago but now I have so much more food to be thankful for. And, over these past few months, it has become less about the food that we eat and more about the people that serve it.
For example:
- We eat Korean all the time, partly because we love kimbap, ddukkboki , and ketchup omelets, but more so because we love Martin, the guy who works at the Korean restaurant, and his family who speak little English but are so sweet no matter how often we come in (even if it’s twice a day…..).
- I’m extremely thankful that neither Carly not I have scurvy, which is, in part, because we love fruit but mostly because the Fruitsters (the family that own the fruit store we go to) always give us samples of fruit while we shop!
- I am currently staying hydrated thanks to the various brands and types of tea at the tea shop where the girls will make and serve us tea for hours while we hang out in the shop. (We always say we are just going to stop in for 10 minutes and end up rolling ourselves out a few hours later full of tea.)
- Finally, the ice cream stand that just opened up near our apartment. Good ice cream is hard to come by in China so when this place opened, we were pumped! And their ice cream is pretty good! We are still a few ice cream cones away from being friends, but with the weather getting warmer, I predict that we will be besties very soon!
Friends:
This one is a little harder this time, for a lot of reasons - one of them being that things got really busy. We don’t have the time to spend with them that we did before and that has definitely made some things harder.
But even though our time with them is rarer, I am still incredibly thankful for the people that we have met and gotten to know over this year.
7 months ago, our friend and his wife and their friends took us in. They made sure we had what we needed physically, spiritually and emotionally. They took the time to get to know us, help us and even gave us the opportunity to work alongside them as they tried to help their community and we tried to get to know Lin’an. As the months have passed and we have been more and more able to do things by ourselves, our friendship has changed to become less of a “thanks for helping us run errands, answering our questions and helping us get by” friendship and more of a “thanks for hanging out” friendship –which, I like much better.
{Today, when I met that same friends brand new set of twins (it’s crazy, what can happen in 7 months), I was thankful, not only, for the friendship that we have had these past 7 months, but for the fact that these precious little babies get to grow up surrounded by this group of kind, loving people.( Which is why it only makes sense that their names are Xiao Ai and Xiao Mei – which mean Little Love and Little Kindness – and they are 33 days of cute, cuddly, goodness) But I was most thankful that, since we have been friends for seven months, it was ok for me to squish the twins’ sweet little faces.}
China/ All of Asia:
I still love China. I love China for all that it is –the people, the culture, the food, the beautiful landscape, everything. And I am so thankful for China. All of the time that I have gotten to spend here, all of the lessons that I have learned (whether I wanted to learn them or not), all of the things that I have gotten to see and experience, I am thankful for all of it. But I am most thankful for the way that my time in China has opened my eyes and my heart to so many other places in the world that I might never have seen or loved without it.
Now, I am also thankful for Asia.
I have loved Korea since the first time that I came to China but I never thought that getting there would ever really be a possibility because I had chosen China.
Carly and I had been planning a trip to Southeast Asia since that same first trip to China but, again, we were never totally sure it would actually happen.
But, thanks to China, both of those dreams became reality.
Also, thanks to China, I feel confident in the fact that, while my time in China may be up after this year, Asia and I are not quite through with each other yet.
I have hope that I’ll be back.
But, I can’t come back to Asia until I have left Asia. So, while I am already looking forward to the day that Asia and I are reunited, I am first counting down the days to when I will be back in America to tell you all, in person, how wonderful Asia is.
Countdown to June 30th: 3 months and ten days.
Here is just a sample of the past year in pictures:
