24 hours - ish

I'm not really willing to do the math right now, but after roughly 24 hours, I'm "home". It was a fun journey, culminating with an entertaining 2 hour taxi ride.

Some of you know, I had the same flight back as Riri, the 3rd grade teacher at my school, and one of my former college classmates. The 11 hour flight actually sailed by ... or should I say "flew" by, and we were navigating the Beijing airport in no time. It was my 3rd time in the airport in the span of 2 months, and since last time I walked between Terminals 1 and 2 about six times (a ten minute walk, no tram!), I'm getting pretty darn good at this! We had no hitches.

While waiting to fly out to Ningbo, we sat next to a convenience store, and the workers were playing with a little mini robot. Kinda looks like a smaller version of the lady robot in Wall E. SOOOOO CUTE! It could sing and dance, mostly country, Chinese oldies, and Shakira. So yes, I had "Waka Waka" stuck in my head for 7 hours till I got home... and now it's stuck in my head again :)

With our mass luggage, Riri and I took separate taxis from Ningbo to Beilun. I asked Riri to talk to my driver though, just to make it clear where we were going, and if he got lost that he should just follow Riri's taxi. My driver had a mind of his own though and took off in the lead. Awesome. He was the type that was determined to talk to me. I've gotten better at this though. Usually they ask me a question and I just shake my head. But then they keep talking and talking, and I keep thinking, why don't they get that I just don't understand what they're saying? Then I realized they're probably asking me yes/no questions to which my answer is always no, such as -

Taxi driver: Do you like China?
Me: *Shakes head*

... whoops! So now I just go with the *blank stare*, which totally worked because after he rambled for 5 minutes he just looked at me and muttered, "ting bu dong" meaning "doesn't understand". That made me smile. He did keep repeating "Beijing" to me, so he must've known we came in on the Beijing flight. This airport only has like 2 gates so it's really not difficult to know the flight schedule. I finally said:

Me: "Meigua (USA) - Beijing. Beijing - Ningbo"
Taxi Driver: "Ningbo - Beilun"
Me: "Yes yes yes yes!
And then he repeated my travel itinerary for about 15 minutes: "Meigua - Beijing. Beijing - Ningbo. Ningbo - Beilun". And then smiled to himself.

That was our complete conversation until we got stuck in traffic and I noticed little white flurries drifting through the beam of the headlights. In my excitement, I involuntarily said, "Xue!" meaning "Snow!". They're so insignificant though, they could actually be dust from all the semi trucks in traffic with us. Still, this caused my taxi driver to start a whole new round of conversation about the "xue", which I didn't understand at all. When we picked up speed, the snow simultaneously changed from flurries to really snowing, causing the *millenium falcon effect* as it appeared that we were jumping into hyperdrive. (You know, when the snow is coming at you so fast that it looks like a zillion shooting stars. And for all you Star Wars fans, I double checked my spelling of the Millenium Falcon on "Wookiepedia"). My driver suddenly began shouting, "Wooooow! Xue!!!!!" and then laughing hysterically. He then pointed at me, said "xue" over and over, and laughed again and again.  As far as I can tell, that point was the first time my driver actually noticed the snow, so earlier, when he was babbling about the xue? He definitely was not referring to the snow. Xue is one of those very popular words in Mandarin and I must've used the wrong tone, so when I thought I was pointing out the snow, I was really saying something entirely different. Again, whoops. Makes me wonder what he was saying when he created that whole lecture all by himself that was not about snow.

When it was finally time to get out and pay, I gave him the amount that the meter showed. But then he reminded me about the toll. As I was pulling out more money for that, a couple 1 dollar bills fell out of my purse. He got super excited and started chanting "meigua money"! So instead of paying him the extra 35 kuai, he was very satisfied with $2. Works for me!

Lastly, in general, if you stop staring at the color of my hair, I'll stop staring at the 18 inches of rhinestones on your boots. Seriously, if rhinestones were living creatures, they would be extinct. Welcome back to China :)