Conclusion

Well that essentially wraps up my crazy year teaching English in China. I did make it to Bangkok after Ko Phi Phi, but there is not really anything worth writing about that happened there. I was mostly waiting for my flight back to China. Also, I won’t bore you with the details of what happened after I returned to Shijiazhuang and then to Beijing. You should just know that my last few days in China were filled with goodbyes, good friends, and lots and lots of beer.
Writing this three months after returning from China, it seems more like a dream than it ever did. Being one of the last remaining Drake graduates in China and waiting for my plane back to America in the Beijing airport; I couldn’t help but think the entire previous year had been a dream. China and my experiences there just seem like an outrageously alien world now.
However, the memories still float and swirl around in my mind: the nervousness and anxiety I had the first week of classes, line dancing to “Achey Breaky Heart” in front of hundreds of Chinese on the National Holiday, playing guitar and singing while dressed as a cowboy at Christmas dinners at fancy hotels, hiking the Great Wall and zip lining down from it over a gorge, riding horses on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, motorbiking along the beaches of Thailand at sunset-these are memories that I’m going to hold on to for a long time.
I still remember looking out the window on one of my first mornings in China and seeing the street full of Chinese people on bikes, buses, taxis, and cars going every which way. At that moment I realized, “I’m in China” which was not so much a statement as it was a realization.