A Beautiful Girl

The gift I was given from a beautiful girl.

In Chengdu, for the most part, every weekday morning, around 8:00 am, I go for a run. More often than not, groups of kids and some adults are walking around the track. Being a foreigner, I often attract attention quite a bit of attention. The day before, a group of young girls saw me running around the track. I was doing a speed workout, so I was going relatively fast. As I was mustering all the speed I could, this one little girl looked at me in awe. As I ran closer to her, her eyes got bigger, and her mouth widened. During my run, she came up to me multiple times and said I was beautiful. Today, she did the same. About a third of the way through my run, she ran up to me with a small black box with a ginger-colored ribbon on top. She handed it to me and said I was beautiful again. Even after that, she smiled at me as I passed and said I was beautiful. On Monday, I’m going to give her a little gift. I’ll give her a charm that my father and I made in America, and I will write that she is beautiful on it. I think that she is the beautiful girl. It is the simple things that sometimes make all the difference: a simple phrase that makes you blush, a simple gesture that makes your heart beat faster, a simple smile, a simple wave. There’s beauty in all of it. *** This morning, class was notably enjoyable. To review all the vocabulary and sentences we’ve learned, we had a little competition. Our morning teacher, Li Lao Shi, formed two groups of students. She first showed us a picture of people playing basketball and asked us to use what we learned to talk about the picture. We went from the obvious to the obscure pretty quickly: from playing basketball to eating basketballs... It's hard to explain. For the next round, we all stood up and had to say a grammatically correct sentence that applied to a new picture on the board. If we said something wrong, we had to sit down. Once again, it got pretty interesting. In the last round, we had to make up questions that could’ve been asked to result in an answer given. In the end, we were spewing every word we had learned and manipulating sentences like crazy. Sadly, my team lost, but it was still very enjoyable. After lunch and afternoon classes, we had a Chinese oral and written test. It went fairly well; I only made a few mistakes. After another long, tiring, and rewarding day, my host dad drove home, and as per usual, I had some fruit after I arrived home. My host sister asked me if I wanted plums, pears, grapes, or watermelon, and being a fairly indecisive person, I said I liked them all, meaning I would willing eat them all not that I wanted to eat them all right at that moment. However, my host sister handed me two bowls of fruit: one with with three pears and eleven plums and another with four sizable slices of watermelon. I ate all of three pears, eleven plums, and three sizable slices of watermelon. After eating my weight in fruit, we had a dinner of rice noodles, rice, fish, and broccoli. I was so full, I could hardly eat anymore, but my love for broccoli and fish got the best of me. Three poems and two glasses of tea later, I called it a night in a state of utter bliss.