Aug. 24 - Times we won't Forget [Day 9]

"As long as we are true friends, distance can never separate us."

*Sorry, but I was really tired the past few days when I came home and didn't have time to post this earlier =p

The days are passing really quickly now, tomorrow is creeping closer and closer. Everyone seems to realize this and is making use of every moment together. This morning we walked from the Sutton Place Hotel to the City Center mall to the CBC broadcasting station. the weather was wonderful today, even the Chengdu kids felt more at home. We had the grand tour of the CBC station, which included journeying through the editing rooms, music producing rooms, and broadcasting rooms. Some of us had the opportunity to speak into professional-looking mics, where they edited out the background sounds to make it sound professional.

We then walked to City hall and took part in an interesting tour of city hall. We covered many offices in City Hall, including the mayor's office. One of the meeting rooms with part of the ceiling that could open and close had wowed everyone when our guide showed us how to control it. In one of the offices, there was an awesome picture on the wall full of bubble gum with a knob sticking out. When you turned the knob, one bubblegum would fall out, all the Chengdu kids enjoyed that! When our tour ended, we still had time before lunch would start, so everyone went outside next to the pool to "chill".

Almost everyone took off their shoes and socks to dip their feet in the cold water. The rest of the cool people, including me (no offence to the people in the water) sat around tables and chatted the whole time. One of the Chengdu boys who stepped in the pool had rolled up his pants to the limit, it was so funny seeing him in short shorts!

At this moment, many of the Chengdu kids started getting nervous about performing in front of everyone. I told them not to worry and I promised them no one would laugh (out loud anyway). Lunch took place in a room in City Hall (I think the Heritage Room), there was a buffet of sandwiches, wraps, fruit, and of course ice cream with unlimited toppings! The mayor made a short speech right before we started eating, also he handed out bags of gifts to all the kids.

When lunch was done and every ice cream toppings was tried, everyone filed to the stage outside the room. The informal program started with a couple speeches by the mayor, Chengdu chaperones and ECBEA representatives, then we moved on to the performance part. First, the 7 Chengdu youth performed sign language actions to the song “真心英雄“ (True hero), which was very inspirational. One of the chaperones performed a Tibetan dance which was really graceful even when she didn't have the traditional dancing costume on. Last but not least on the list of performances was Zhang Sen, one of the Chengdu boys, who performed Kung Fu to Kung fu Fighting. The music surprised everyone by starting very ancient chinese-y, then it suddenly broke out in the English song. Everyone was so surprised when they saw what he was capable of: the bridge and five cartwheels in a row, that we were cheering very loudly for him.

When all the performances ended, we went to sign the mayor's guest book first, then went to the book depository. Many of the Chengdu buddies had requested to get English dictionaries (which for a moment I thought it was weird, but then I remembered that they lived in China, where all the dictionaries would be in Chinese). I recommended some of my favourite books to lots of the buddies. Which they gladly took my advice. After book searching, the Chengdu kids were given the awesome red Vancouver Olympic gloves (which I don't own a pair myself), they were really happy and tried them on right away. Whenever they put on the gloves they would always be warm because of their memories from Edmonton.

We walked around Kingsway Garden mall to kill some time, then went straight to Dynasty Century Palace restaurant. We started with some more speeches and jumped right to a 27 minute video made by yours truly. The video was filled with memories of these past 8 days, watching it again and again was like replaying our past adventure over and over, and there was never a dull moment. After dinner, the Chengdu kids repeated their group performance from city hall, which created a huge wall of cameras and video cameras right in front of the stage. No wonder they looked so nervous!

"A farewell is necessary before we can meet again."

There was a few times tonight that friends from Chengdu would say "I can't believe tomorrow is the last day! I'm going to miss you guys." I told them to not think about it and just to have fun tonight.

The night ended with karaoke sung by our Chengdu guests mixed with Edmonton buddies, I thought the speaker might have been on too loud, because it sounded like the singers were screaming in the mic, but then I realized that I was standing right in front of the speaker (should've noticed that earlier). We left together eager and not looking forward (at the same time) to whatever tomorrow brings.

Beware of tomorrow's weather ; cloudy skies with 99% chance of teardrops.

"Yesterday brought the beginning. Tomorrow brings the end. Somewhere in the middle, we became the best of friends."

Megan
Over and Out