Hey, Insomnia. We're Not Friends.

I can't sleep for the life of me. This, my friends, is the trouble with having amazing weekends with my best friend, which happen to entail sleeping until one o'clock in the afternoon.

The entire group, with the exception of five of us, went to Suzhou this weekend. Megan's roommate and my roommate were among them so I moved into Megan's room for the weekend. On Friday night, our head teacher Kailey came down and hung out with us. We watched Home Alone- one of my favorites- and just stayed up late chatting about everything under the sun.

On Saturday we decided to go out into town with Scott and Kailey. McDonald's was on our fatty American brains. It's about 40 minutes or so away from the school by bus. We enjoyed our artery-stiffening, cholesterol-inducing lunch and walked around the mall. I bought a few DVDs at one of the stores- how can you possibly resist, they're 10 kaui ($1.50 each)- and then Megan and I headed to a part of town that we have dubbed "Old Changzhou." I haven't the foggiest what the real name of the place is, but that's what happens when you can't read Chinese. It's a really beautiful place and looks like what I had imagined all of China would. I finished almost all of my shopping there. There's a very few things I want to get. There are only four people on my gift list still. That's not bad considering I started out with twenty or so. We stopped by the night market on the way home and grabbed a yummy, super delicious wrap. WHY is there no real Chinese food in America?! You're all being scammed, in case you weren't aware.

We took the lazy way back to the school, in a tuktuk. My, how I love those things. Once back to the room, we wasted no time making ourselves as publicly unacceptable as possible. After all, that's the best part of the day! We've adopted some alter egos recently. Megan bought this incredulously ugly sweater and she looks like a Swedish milkmaid whenever she wears it. To add to the persona, she always throws her hair up in bun when she has it on. As for me, I've decided that leggings are acceptable to wear as pants. Don't judge me, people. I've also been braiding my hair lately. Maybe it's because it's three feet long and I'm a hair away from shaving myself bald. Pun intended. She's Olga, I'm Helga. We're hilarious. Actually, we had a serious discussion yesterday as to why we laugh SO much when we're together. We've come to the conclusion that we mostly laugh at each other's laughs and facial expressions while said laughter is occurring. Oh, what a vicious cycle. But I love it.

For example, at one point, Megan just stands up randomly and says, "Well, it's about time to eat again." Cue inconsolable laughter. Would this be funny to normal people? No, probably not. Sucks to be normal, that's all I know. I told her today that when I go home I'll be cracking stupid jokes with Lucas and he probably won't laugh. I'll start crying and think about how Megan would have laughed about it.

Anyways, we watched three movies Saturday night. Peter Pan, Revolutionary Road- with Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, let me tell you, I MUCH prefer Titanic-, and Taken. It was the worst idea of my life to watch Taken while living in another country. Hello, nightmares.

On Sunday, today, we drug our lazy arses out of bed around one p.m. I got in the shower and then all of a sudden I hear Megan talking to someone. When I come out of the bathroom she says, "You will never believe who is standing in the hallway." Well, this is China and I can tell you without a doubt that there is certainly never a dull moment in this place. When we were on our way to Guilin, two months ago, we met this really nice Chinese man named "Andy" on the metro in Shanghai as we were trying to make our way to the train station. We were running really late and were super concerned that we were going to miss our train. He goes out of his way to take us all the way to the boarding platform for our train. Guess who was standing in the hall? Yup, Andy. We hurried up and got ready thinking we could go to lunch with him or something. We get to the bottom of the stairs and he tells us that he has to go. He came all the way out here (he lives in Shanghai) to see us for .5 seconds. Chinese people are so weird.

We decided to go out to Muslim anyways, even though it was pouring rain. It was delicious, as always, but there was a guy cooking that we hadn't ever seen before. At one point, Megan realizes that he's talking about how big our boobs are. Excuse me?! When he comes over so we can pay, Megan smiles sweetly at him and says, "Why thank you, pervert." Oh, the joys of a language barrier.

After yummy lunch we walked to the train ticket office and got our tickets for Shanghai this weekend. It's our last vacation before we're coming home. It seriously seems like yesterday that we were buying tickets to Guilin for our first vacation. Where has the time gone? That's another issue for another post.

So we decided to back to the shopping area where we went Saturday. There's a Walmart there and all kinds of stuff. We *may* have gotten on the wrong bus three different times and wound up in a part of town we'd never been before. Four hours later, we finally made it. I'm not sure what's gotten into me. I won't go to a Chinese hospital for fear of organ harvesting but I will give in to getting a piercing which very well could lead to my ear rotting off of my head. Let's hope for the best? After we made it back to the school, we watched Jack Frost- we're on a Christmas movie kick, can you tell?

That brings me to now. Where I am currently contemplating why in the world I decided to ram a shard of metal through the ear on the side that I have slept on ever since I can remember. Oh yeah, because my other ear is legitimately deformed and there's no way that would have worked out either.

I've realized that it's really the small things that I'm going to miss the most about China. Walks into town, bus rides with smelly Asians who talk about our big noses and big eyes, Muslim food, night market food, tuktuks, and seeing the smiley security guards when we get back to the school from wherever we've been. I've also realized that it's going to be a lot harder to adjust to America than I had previously though. Used to, I didn't think there'd be any adjustment at all. After all, I did live there for twenty and three fourths of a year before I moved to China. Now, as I've realized how accustomed I am to life in China, I'm starting to realize how overwhelming it will be to be back in America. How strange it will be to be able to fully understand the conversations around me, to not take a bus or a train anywhere, to feel like I'm paying way too much for everything, to constantly be converting U.S. dollars to kuai, to sleep on an actual bed- I'm seriously probably going to have to sleep on the floor for a good few weeks, to eat food that is jam-packed full of preservatives and other junk, to going every single day without doing the one thing that I love the most about my life right now- and that's seeing my precious babies everyday.

Aaaaaand this is what happens when I can't sleep. I write novels about things that probably no one cares about. That's okay, it's mostly for my own documentation, anyways :)