An Unforgettable Vacation
This summer I went to back to China. It had been 3 years since I had been there and I missed all of my relatives. I also had some very close friends living there. Most of all, I wanted to see my dad. He had quit his job to begin his own company and spent most of his time in Beijing working hours nonstop on his website. It was a warm Saturday and my mom’s friend Rachel came to pick us up and offered to drive us to the San Francisco Airport. We couldn’t get a direct flight to Beijing so we first flew to Shanghai where my dad was taking a business trip. At the airport, I saw my friend Tarun who was going to India. I was happy to see the country in which I was born but I also regretted leaving America behind with so much friends and so much fun stuff left to do. It was my last year of elementary school and we had many parties and other fun events going on there but sadly, I wasn’t even there for half of them. The most important one was probably the 5th grade graduation. But as I reached Shanghai, I started to forget all of this as our adventure began.
We spent 1 day in Shanghai before we took the train to Beijing. On that day, we visited the tourist attractions and ate some really good food at a restaurant. We had a lot of fun and took a lot of pictures. When it was time to go, I was sad we didn’t get to eat some more of that delicious food but I was reassured by my parents that I had only tasted the beginning. We got crummy seats on the train and we had to sleep on the top bunk bed. It was okay because none of us fell off (duh, or we wouldn’t be here). I slept well and had a good time on the train because all I did was eat, play gameboy, listen to my MP3, and sleep. As I got out of the Beijing train station, I could see the familiar smells of smoke, the towering buildings, the crazy car drivers, and tons of hobos (beggars) everywhere. At first, we lived in a house that belonged to my aunt who now had a better house. It was at the top of a 6 story building with no elevator and we got a great exercise out of that. We started meeting up with friends right away. I was especially glad to see my “grandparents”: Gao Nai Nai and Li Yie Yie and their son Xiao Zhao Shu Shu. Life in Beijing was fun. I liked going into the mountains with my “grandparents”. The fishing part was especially fun. This summer I learned how to cast the line, put on bait, and pull the hook out of the fish. There was one time when I almost tied Li Yie Yie in the amount of fish we caught. Of course, I also wanted to see my relatives really bad so sometime in July; we took the train to Yanzhou, a town in the province of Shandong.
The day we reached Yanzhou, my 2nd uncle, my grandpa, and my older cousin came to pick us up from the train station. It was a good thing that my uncle had a car or else it would have taken us forever to get to my grandparents house. For the month that we stayed there, we visited a lot of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I liked going to my 2 cousin’s house. Of course we got to play a lot of video games but along with the games came work and I mean lots of if. Sometimes I would have 4 hours of math and Chinese work to do. Most of the Chinese was completely weird to me and I couldn’t understand half of what the books were saying but this taught me more Chinese words and improved my vocabulary by quite a bit. Life in Yanzhou was also very boring at times and listening to my cousins’ crappy English was very irritating (no offense). Of course we couldn’t stay there forever so in August, we took the train back to Beijing where my dad was still working his head off.
Beijing was just normal like always. Same as June except it was a lot more humid and the weather was horrible. For me, it was back to playing video games, watching boring Chinese television shows, and of course fishing. All throughout my vacation, I had missed my friends but I finally found out the email address of one of them (you know who you are) and this friend was also able to give me the email address of another. This made it better and I was able to email them. Of course, emailing doesn’t help very much when you haven’t seen them in 3 months. I really wanted to come back to America and I begged and begged and finally, the thought of losing our green cards if we didn’t come back forced my parents to agree. At first, I was slightly worried that our whole family was going to ride the plane back to California on 9/11. What a great day to go on a plane!!! It turned out alright because to my relief, Osama bin Laden was still in hiding and he didn’t hijack our plane and crash into the Golden Gate Bridge! YAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well, at last I finally got back to America, a day later, I started going to school and it was just like the year before, except this year brought new friends, new adventures, new destinies, a new school, new teachers, and a whole new world.
A nonfiction story that reflects my memories of my visit to China last year. Notice that my vocabulary isnt very good as is my grammar and writing skills because English is my second language and language arts is my worst subject.
