Diederik’s Last Night in Town

I didn’t sleep after watching the World Cup final.  The s’mores gave me energy, I guess, and it was early evening in the US – a perfect time to talk to people back home, and one I’m rarely awake for.  By the time I did feel sleepy, it was 8:15 and I still had to take a shower before my finals started at 9 a.m.

My first final was Listening, a makeup from the test I missed last week.  It was just me and the teacher, which probably made my nodding off slightly more obvious.  I think I still did okay, though.

I had a half hour before my second final, so I went to our usual classroom and settled down for a nap, figuring my classmates would arrive soon and wake me up.  But (you probably saw this coming) that didn’t happen, and I woke up at 10:10 to an empty classroom.  I had missed class last week, and apparently they had changed classrooms without letting me know.  Good thing I have an awesome internal alarm clock – while I can be embarrassingly late to things, my body won’t let me sleep past the point of serious damage.  So I was 15 minutes late to my final, but I still finished second.

I went to lunch with my classmates (Aleid, Eunice, and Jelle) at the malatang soup place.  That stuff is amazingly delicious, even when the air outside is as blazing hot as the soup!  Then I was due for a nap – rather, long overdue!

I only ended my nap because Aleid and I decided to meet at the beach and I hoped to continue it there.  But there was too much stuff going on at the beach to sleep.  We demolished a kilo or so of lychee, I made a clog out of sand, we watched the couples taking wedding pictures as always, and we tried to figure out what people were digging for in the low tide area.  (Pirate treasure?  Worms?  Who knows?)

After a shower, we grabbed takeout for dinner and took it up to Diederik’s place for his last night in town.  It was like going back to the beginning, as my earliest memory of Diederik (and one of my first memories of Xiamen at all) was having drinks on his roof the night before our medical examination.  We had beautiful weather and a beautiful view, and all in all it was great to have a farewell conversation instead of goodbye party.  Some topics were off limits of course (the World Cup, Yerkin’s birthday feast, and finals), but that just meant we talked about other things.  Like weddings – and how Yerkin’s going to invite us to that feast.

As Yerkin said, you know it’s ending when you start talking about how it all began . . .

We progressed from the roof to malatang place for barbecue – of course.  While we ate, Eunice and I started a tradition of making people pose with my fan.

Best prop EVER!

There was another farewell party at Paradise, this one for Katrin and Chris.  We went for a little while, but when we only knew the two of them it got depressingly obvious how many of our friends had already left.  It’s getting down to the final few, where I wave goodbye and maybe there’s no one to wave back?