DAY 5 (Wednesday, February 6th, 2008): Jinghong - Chinese New Year’s Eve, My 21st Birthday
My birthday/Chinese New Year’s was awful. First I was sick, then lonely. We got into Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna, at night and did laundry in the shower. Lauren and I stood in the shower in our dirty clothes and soaped them up with our Tide detergent bar and then scrubbed them with a laundry scrub brush. It was a challenging task, messy and time-consuming, and the results weren’t even that great. After that we went out in search of food but everything was closed because of the holiday and we ended up eating in a random hotel’s lobby, ordering off the room service menu. How wonderful. After that I was left all alone and I sat all alone on the dark patio of the fourth floor of the hotel and watched the fireworks, but I couldn’t enjoy it or anything because I still remembered that it was my birthday and that I was alone and sad. My friends knew it was my birthday, they just chose to make their own separate plans, but oh well. I couldn’t find a phone to call home so I finally called Kevin on my cell phone so that I could talk to at least one person who cared about me and my birthday. It was one of the most lonely days of my life – there I was in beautiful Xishuangbanna, during the biggest holiday in China, my 21st birthday, and I was by myself. I was miles and miles away from everybody that actually cares about me and it hurt. I kept thinking about what I would have been doing for my birthday had I been at home. Not sitting by myself, sobbing on the phone to my boyfriend who was thousands of miles away, that’s for sure.
It was the worst birthday ever, as you can imagine. My story gets better from there, though.
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