The Way We Were: Part I

I've been asked to tell the story of how I met my husband; or, how I had to travel half-way around the world to fall in love and get married. This will probably take more than one post!

This starts way back in my junior year of college. I was fortunate enough to get a special travel scholarship, which gave me some money for my tuition and some additional money for international travel, anywhere I wanted to go. There were two other students who received similar scholarships, and one professor who facilitated all this. He suggested it would be a good idea for the three of us, plus him, to all travel together to help our money go as far as possible. We all gave our ideas of where we wanted to go. China was not even on my spectrum. I thought: Communism, Tiananmen Square, gray, ugly, why would I want to go there? (Boy, did I have a lot to learn.) But China it was, in the end. I figured that I could hardly get any farther away from home than that, so it would at least be very different, and ok, probably interesting.

So we went, for two weeks, and by the end of the trip I was in love. No, not with my husband; I was still a couple of years away from meeting him. I was in love with CHINA. The food, the people, the history, the culture, everything. Climbing the Great Wall was exhilarating. Cruising the canals of Suzhou was foreshadowing (I'd later spend a year there). And standing in Tiananmen Square...the beginning of enlightenment.

When I came back home, I began looking for ways that I could go back to China, to spend more time there. I found an organization that would train me to be an English teacher and send me over with a teammate. I left for training the summer after I graduated from college, a little over a year after my original trip. I was in China again that August, standing once again in Tiananmen Square, amazed that I was back.

That first year, I lived in Wuhan. It's a very industrial city, dusty and gray, and the local dialect is much different than Mandarin, the national language. That was OK; I still hardly knew any Mandarin yet. I had an apartment with a living room, kitchen/dining area, bedroom, and bathroom. It had carpet, hot water in the bathroom, a refrigerator, and a phone; this is better than some foreign teachers had it, far far better than many locals lived. But it was COLD. Wuhan lies on both sides of the Yangtze River. North of the Yangtze, buildings are heated. South of the river, you make do with space heaters that are prone to blow fuses if you turn them up too high. Guess which side of the river I lived on?

I didn't meet Leo until my second semester in Wuhan. By that time, I had already decided I was coming back for a second year. My students that first year were all adults. When Leo walked into the interview that all of our students had to go through, I could tell by the mischievous glint in his eyes that I was going to have to keep an eye on this one. I figured he'd be a prankster I'd have to watch out for. He was that, but little did I know...