Six-thousand hits!

A panda-free bamboo "patch" at Renmin University

Six-thousand hits?
Who would’ve thought that when we started this blog just three weeks ago that we’d get over 6,000 hits?
By all accounts, it’s been a popular thing on both ends. We enjoyed sharing our experiences. We watched the counter number grow and hoped that folks enjoyed reading our posts and personal blogs.

I’ve been trying to describe my life in China for the past month in e-mail to friends and family members back in the United States.
Most of the time, I come down to one sentence: “It’s been rich,” I say, then hope that’s satisfying enough.
Each day comes with a new adventure, something that we’d never done or experienced before.
Unfortunately, our everyday lives are often not as rich.

A brass elephant at the Forbidden City.

We’re leaving China Thursday. Seven Missouri students are staying for a couple more weeks to volunteer for the Paralympic Games in Beijing, but the bulk of us are headed back to Missouri.
We’ve been in China long enough (The trip started at the end of June for most of our group) that, in many ways, our Beijing lives have become our lives.
Don’t misunderstand. We miss our lives in the United States and we’re excited to get back to friends and loved ones. But as I chat with the students in the hotel elevator, in the lobby, in the campus canteens, it’s clear that we’ll miss our lives in Beijing as well.

Last night, our hosts at Renmin threw a lavish dinner party in our honor with speeches and songs and dancing.

They toasted us.

They gave us gifts.
They invited us to return and thanked us for helping to make the Beijing Olympics a rousing success.
For our part, we felt satisfied. We felt like maybe we had done an important thing.
And we thanked the folks in Beijing for the opportunity to feel that way.

- Greg Bowers