Leaving Beijing

My last days in Beijing were super busy, as we had two finals- two oral reports which we should at least partially memorize, and a written portion. As we learned a lot of characters in 3 weeks, it ended up being a fair amount of work. But here is photo from our last real lunch.

Last small class! Our teacher is on the right

To top off all the studying, we also had to prepare that afore-meantioned skit! But it ended up being very enjoyable, starting off with the MCs performing an adaptation of "California Girls" with Beijing related lyrics(all in Chinese of course). A choice line translated is, "One month without seeing sunshine", which had us all laughing. Hard to capture the show in one photo (especially since I didn't take that many), but here is one of the first section of C section's skit.

Last run in Beijing! After several days of heavy pollution, it cleared up just in time for a last good run.

Graduation! Here is C class, (separated into 3-4 sections usually) and some of our teachers too. 

It was with mixed feelings that I left Beijing. On the one hand, the air quality is hazardous for most of the time, but other than that and the other usual problems big cities have (wealth discrepancy ), I found myself really liking the city. But we had a flight to catch, so after a bus/taxi combo adventure, in which we thought we would miss our flight, we made it to the airport an hour early. And then it turned out I had missed a 7 when entering my passport to buy the ticket, which could have ended badly, but they said it was no problem.  Though you can't see the sign, we made it through security.

The plane we took may have been bigger than the one I came to China on! And they fed us for free! Because our flight was delayed a bit, we ended up landing in Kunming around 2:20am, and got our bag around 3:00am, which meant we missed the last bus to the city. Instantly swarmed by cab drivers when we left the terminal, we settled on a female driver, who after some haggling agreed to drive us for 70 yuan, about 11 dollars. The new airport is rather far from the city, and to drive either way also requires paying tolls, so this was a very reasonable price. Additionally, after driving us to Gaolin's friends apartment's address, she waited with us until the friend appeared. And so, at around 4:00 am, we met her friend (who was from her hometown, they had been classmates through elementary and middle school, he had been watching over his cousins since he started his break, and would be leaving to 文山 the next day) and settled in for some sleep.

And so I arrived in the land of warmth, rice noodles, and clean air! More coming up.