(Please note: Erin posted this for Abigail due to a laptop issue of hers, so it’s likely not how she would format it, especially the photos!)

Sorry it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted an update. Rugby is all wrapped up! The men’s team has chosen its players for the national rugby tournament that will be held in Shandong June 6-10 – hopefully they can make it a few rounds in! This will be the first national rugby competition UIC rugby team has been in since before COVID hit. Even though we (and everyone at UIC by that point) are done with finals for this semester, Shandong is pretty far away, so travel fares, admission tickets and hotel fees would be too expensive for us to go. Hopefully we can watch on live recording to support these guys!

We had a final rugby dinner during Labor Day holiday, and played mini rugby matches mix-matched with current and alumni rugby team members (I got my first “try,” basically a rugby touchdown, and ran almost the whole field with an alumni player right on my back!). It was so fun to play with previous members, see this huge family come together, go to dinner together, and celebrate the current graduates. Definitely a day to remember. We also took official pictures with the ruby team on picture day – the entire campus is bustling with students in their caps and gowns taking pictures with their class, friends, and groups. Again, lots of fun and a bittersweet ending to this chapter of our lives.

After Labor Day break, classes really picked up with final projects and reports for Peter and me. We were incredibly busy and did our best to balance these many deadlines while enjoying the last few weeks of time with our friends – especially Avril. We even took a day to go down to Gongbei port plaza area, where we stayed before school started, to look around the shopping center, get some bakery items, visit A and Lan at the boutique, and then headed home. 

I also have been making the most of our free access to the gym by going every night before dinner and time with friends outside the restaurant just on the other side of the campus wall. My favorite restaurant is the same as the one near Gongbei, Lanzhou. I liked to go there after the gym to eat dinner and sit with Avril (and sometimes Losha a.k.a. Alexey). We also made friends with the restaurant owners’ 5 year old daughter named Ma Zhiling, who we call “Little Teacher.” She is SASSY and just tries to gaslight you all the time, but she loves hanging out with us and always wants to play (mind) games with us. Her mom told us how happy she was to see her daughter so happy and smiling while she hangs out with us, sometimes until 11pm! Because Lanzhou is located right on the other side of the college campus wall, and our school is pretty isolated from regular city/town life, there aren’t any other kids around (except one other girl) for her to play with and spend time with. On top of that, the parents are so busy running the restaurant they also can’t spend lots of time directly entertaining Little Teacher – hence why when she started happily hanging out at our table every night it made her parents really happy! It made us happy too to see her smile and want to play games with us, having fun tricking us and saying her favorite phrase “bu shi” meaning “nope.” 

On Sunday, June 2nd, Avril and I went out for a “mango date.” We went to a dessert/breakfast restaurant together to get mango desserts and breakfast items… so delicious! We ate cucumbers in a spicy pepper and soy sauce sauce, sweet mango chunks, changfen (rice noodles) with a spicy soy sauce and pork flavored sauce, fried milk rolls (SO GOOD), mango milk pudding with boba, and ginger milk pudding! Then we walked to the bus station to take the public bus about an hour where we picked out some professional photos of Avril that she had taken previously, and ended with some Korean BBQ (my first time, and it was delicious). It was so much fun, and we hung out with Ma Zhiling and two other friends before saying goodbye to Avril until the next time we meet each other. A bitter but very very sweet goodbye! (And of course we still talk all through the day.) 

Tony also took me to the old UIC Campus that was rented through BNU and we went to a nearby restaurant for some northern Chinese food. This was the first restaurant Tony went to with his friends when he was an exchange student here at UIC like me. It was delicious! I think northern food is more up our alley. We ate pork that tasted just like orange chicken, mapo tofu (one of my mom’s favorites!), sweet/candied pumpkin or squash (soft and glazed in the same sugar as bing tang hulu, comes out nice and hot… you then pull it, because it’s very sticky, straight up off the plate and dip it into a bowl of water to get nice sugar silk strands off the bottom of the squash/pumpkin pieces), beef friend dumplings, pork fried noodles, “3 ground veggies” is what the dish was called (eggplant, green bell peppers, and potato… I even tried the eggplant and it was… DELICIOUS, mom you knew what you were talking about all these years…). It was a very lovely dinner, where we talked with Tony easily and passed the time. To our surprise at the end, he also treated us! (Usually we split all of our outing costs.) He’s been such a great friend to us, helping us get familiar with the rugby team, the school, this area and Chinese culture. He’s been very welcoming to us since the beginning and will always value his friendship while we were here.