1000 joys, 1000 sorrows

Is it just me, or whenever something crappy happens, something equally great happens within minutes (ok maybe hours or days, but time is relative). The last few days have been a bit of a roller coaster, as my life certainly tends to be. Just like the ancient Buddhists say: life is but 1,000 joys, and 1,000 sorrows.

Jason was fired/quit on Thursday. So my play mate was uprooted from my life and I had about 45 minutes to react and say goodbye. He will likely either head back to Canada or go up and work in the Northern part of China. It's a long story and all stems from a combination of his motorbike being seized a month ago and then typical Chinese business and cultural practices. So I am bummed to lose my only 'good' friend in China. He was on of those people I just connected with right away. You know when you think about how long you've known them you think 'holy crap I feel like I've known this person for years, not just two months!' So it is a real drag to see him go.

The night it all went down I was heading to my third badminton practice ever. I was learning the rules because I had agreed to play in a tournament this weekend. Why? Because the thought of it scared the crap out of me. When I got home from that practice, bummed about Jason and annoyed that I had agreed to make a fool of myself, I saw that I had an email in my inbox.  It informed me I had just won a pretty big contract to develop and administer a management training program to an entire Real Estate company here in Suzhou. Yipes! It will kinda be like classroom-based consulting. I know the issues upper management is having with it's middle managers, and I am creating this 8 week course to train them all on leadership, conflict resolution, marketing, sales, etc to help alleviate the issues. I am very excited and it will be awesome experience and fun, too! The money is going to pay for my Indonesia trip, woohooo! So three nights a week I will be working on that for the next few months. Which will be good also to keep me from feeling lonely. Yes, typical me, filling the voids with work...but a true workaholic wouldn't know they were doing it, would they?;)

Friday night a friend from badminton (David, on the left) took May and I to a wine tasting. Put on by him!  We had some amazing wines that David had to specially have imported. A merlot from France and a Cab-Sauv from Italy... so good! These wines are not available anywhere in China so it was especially cool because of that. That is Henry, the owner of the restaurant, on the right.

It got a little saucy, as any wine tasting would. And David started to sing some really cool traditional Taiwanese songs. He is great fun and I have taken to calling him IGGY (I.G. actually, which stands for Italian Guy). He is unlike 99.99% of Chinese guys and reminds me a lot of the crazy, womanizing, "La Dolche Vita" Italian men in my life. My theory is, so long as you are not married to Italian men, they are great!




 
The next afternoon, it was my first badminton tournament.  I got a bit of a case of the nerves, but had fun too.  I played in three mixed doubles games with this cool guy, Denny, who lives in Vancouver half the year and then works here the other half (we called ourselves 'team Canada'), and we only won one game but I really started getting it by the end. May and David are a team and are very good. They won the mixed doubles and this is a pic below of them during one of their games. We are a team of about 20 (3 girls) and there was another team from Shanghai that came over for the weekend to play against us. Apparently this is the highest level of league in China besides the Olympic team (why in the hell am I on the team then?!? I guess they DESPERATELY need girls.)  and Denny said to me the thing he misses the most about China when he is in Canada is the quality of badminton.

There was a good mens doubles final match where I got to see what 'real' badminton was supposed to look like at the end of our day. The Shanghai team won.

However, I was a bad teammate and struggled to watch the game and cheer my teammates on because there were three of the  women from China's National Team practicing on the other court. I am not one to get start struck (remember the Owen Wilson and Paris Hilton stories from Maui?) . In fact, most of the time I don't even know when someone is famous. But I have always been in awe of professional athletes. I get really nervous around them and really feel like a five year old watching their hero. These women where unbelievable athletes. They made it look so easy and are so dedicated. I was in awe.