Maturity and Youthfulness (成長和青春)

I spent the second half of the day with Kevin today. Met him a while back at BANANA, one Kalle's Chinese friends, nice guy. I went ice skating for the first time. It wasn't that difficult, skates were a little narrow, but that aside, it was a lot of fun. Real similar to rollerblading.. which I gave up after breaking my collar bone, but I guess I can still skate a little. Didn't fall hard today.. I'm making up for all those times I fell snowboarding for the first time, haha. Yeah, went to 未名湖 (Not Yet Named Lake) with Kevin and met Smilline and Angeline there. Some of Smilline's highschool friends were there too. Actually it was very busy, people skating all over the place. We made a big trane and skated around the lake, unfortunately the last one ended in a 5-6 person pile up, one of Smilline's friends got her finger cut, and the girls left after that.. cut didn't look serious, but it was bleeding a lot. This one girl I met today was just learning to skate, really funny because she didn't really glide across the ice.. scraped across with little granny footsteps, haha. I think she needed a little more spirit, haha.

So afterward, Kevin and I went to his dorm and looked at some pictures, good stuff. His birthday party was all girls, haha. I'm going to order a book, "The Google Story," for him. Apparently a foreign book like this cost around $30 in China. Real expensive, my school books here were maybe $7 each. Another thing, from Peking Un. it's really difficult to browse foreign internet pages.. loading is very slow.

Next, we went out to eat 点心 (dim sum/a little piece of heart) with two of his Guangdong highschool friends. Kevin said that the Guangdong food here is the same as his home's. It wasn't bad.. never had Dim Sum before. pork, wrapped with yellow something into little balls, marinated chicken feet, tongue with 萝卜 (big radish), sweat meat cakes, 粥 (rice porridge), 炒饺子 (fried wanton), 蛋糕 (egg cake), flour/fish cake. Lots of food for 64 Yuan. Good quality, clean, service, nice 5th story view of the city.. restaurant was nice. It was great listening to Kevin and his pals talk. They spoke Cantonese mostly, pretty cool. Kevin translated for me a bit so I could kind of follow their discussion. Cantonese people are different than Northerners. Different kind of casual, "good friend," animated feeling. They were talking about girls, how one of the guys' girlfriend is really strong in the inside, can take of herself; how everyone new these two people liked each other, but he didn't say anything because he's shy, how one guy already has a girl but is having trouble because other girls are asking him out, Kevin told his feelings to this girl a while ago, but he failed.. miss Right is out there.. maybe somewhere close. It's something about that language, Mandarin doesn't have it.. it's like a embarassed honesty, sentimental but gangster at the same time. Hehe, I like hanging out with these guys!

Oh yeah! Kevin and I continued the topic we started with Angeline last night, about who is more mature, and first appearances and stuff. This conversation was important not only for the content, but also that we spoke both in English and Chinese. I thought it almost impossible to have a talk beyond "how are you" in Chinese. I know we didn't use a lot.. but I barely noticed that we were doing it, ha! So, Kevin told me, yeah "I'm not angry you said I act a little still like a kid." It's important to be mature, you have to be able take care of business, make money and support your family.. but you also must have a child's heart. Children aren't afraid to show their feelings. When the're happy, sad, angry or confused they show it. They can share their feelings and enjoy the company of others; family, friends, wife/husband, children, or pets. I guess the thing about children is they give unconditionally, without worrying about hiding anything.. very honest. You need to have both of these qualities, to be independent and dependant on the love of others. It's that simple.