"Is it because you need a job?"

With national holidays, trips, schedule changes and only three weeks left, we have had to start saying our goodbyes. This past weekend we said goodbye to a group of people who played a huge role in helping us to settle in to Lin'an and who have become very near and dear to my heart over this year.

June will not be playing out how we had originally thought it would, so our goodbye was sort of sudden and we assumed that people would be a little surprised (especially because we are technically here until the 24th but we just won't be around to actually see them) and they were, just not in the way that we had thought they would be.

They've always known that we are here to teach for a year but they didn't really realize that "we are here teaching for a year" meant "we are leaving at the end of the school year." A lot of them met our goodbyes with "why", "wait, where are you going?" and "ok, so when are you coming back?" They also threw out suggestions of how we could stay, "if you don't buy the tickets you don't have to go, right?" And when that didn't work, people offered to find us new jobs so that we could stay.

Eventually, we had explained that we were not leaving because we did not have jobs or because we had already bought the tickets but that we were leaving because we missed our family's, our pets and cheeseburgers.

And as much as we love this place and these people - it's time to go home.

*As we are saying our goodbyes, we also want to tell everyone Thank You for all of the help and friendship that we have been given by people this year, so, we have been writing Thank You notes. We have written, what feels like, a million of them and so, I figured, one more couldn't hurt. So, I wrote one to China, the reason we are writing so many Thank You notes in the first place. You can find it in my next post!*

#China #teaching #Linan