Prepare for Takeoff

The movers are coming for my shoes tomorrow. They're also coming for my picture frames, my giant cleaver that reduces garlic to tiny slivers, the assorted goods compiled over two years of life in a new country.

I can hardly believe it. I mean, i've been counting down in that masochistic way you might poke a bruise. You know it will hurt but still you do it.

And what's there to say that, in another one of life's moments that provokes triteness, hasn't already been said? At the beginning of this journey, my brother and I got into an argument. His sentiment: 'But who's going to help you if you get sick? You don't have any family there. You're so far away!'

There's no denying that China is far away; it is so, so different to anywhere I've ever travelled to before. But the expat bubble that has become my life abroad has its perks, the biggest of which is the establishment of my Shanghai family. The people who invited me to dinner when I was new; who walked my sobbing ass home when kidney news invaded; who orchestrated several weekends away to destinations unseen; who helped me keep the Thanksgiving tradition alive; who ate, drank, commiserated with me during both very sad and very happy moments.

I'll see these people again; this I know. But it's the end of an era, so this week, I'm allowed to weep a little bit.

Hangzhou

In the death throes of the school year I decided to take the role of 'trip organiser' and I rallied the troops (if you can call seven teaching-exhausted women troops) for a weekend away in Hangzhou, home of tea plantations, fancy hotels and general tranquility, or whatever the Chinese counterpart of this might be.

The original plan was to head to Yangshou near Guilin but that involved a flight followed by a three-hour bus ride and that seemed like too much of a headache. Instead, we opted for a one-hour train journey to the leafy vegetation of the five-star Millennium Hotel Hangzhou. I'm getting classy in old age.

Hangzhou is a city known for its beauty, in particular West Lake, a large inland lake laden with cherry blossoms and rural trails. Our hotel was a few kilometres away from all of this but we didn't mind; less lake, less crowd. Neither did the rain--all weekend it poured steadily down. 

As such, much of our adventure involved indoor pursuits of our hotel: swimming and gyming and drinking wine in good company.

In a brief window of reprieve, we made it outdoors and were rewarded appropriately. Fields of tea stacked themselves up the hills and we even found a properly Chinese meal.

As far as last weekend trips with friends go, I couldn't complain.