My day started out pretty normally. In the morning, I again walked to Chinese class. After class, I walked home with Gloria. I surfed the internet, went to cooking class, and then went to the bus station to buy tickets for Songpan, where I would be staying over the weekend. Marissa and I were going to meet at the bus station, but I decided that I could buy the ticket for her and she could pay me back later. I tried texting and calling Marissa to tell her this, but her phone wasn't working. Anyways, I arrived at the bus station, asked the ticket seller for two tickets to Songpan, and was transferred to another ticket seller who spoke some English. I told her what I wanted and she gave me the two tickets. I paid for them, but as I was leaving, three different women came over one after the other to look at my ticket. At first, I thought they were looking at it to make sure I got the right tickets, but then I got a weird feeling. I gave the last woman who came over to look at my ticket a dirty look and walked away. I kind of panicked and thought maybe they're looking at my ticket to see where I'm going and want to rob me or something outrageous like that. I later found out from Wentao that this it is a common thing in China for Chinese to be curious about what foreigners are doing. They like to know where the foreigners are going, take pictures of foreigners or of the same things that foreigners are taking pictures of, and look at what type of things foreigners have. She even told me that when foreigners are paying, Chinese people look in their wallets to see how much money they have. Supposedly they're just curious, but I don't know how much I believe that....
I left the bus station a little frazzled. I stepped into a taxi and told the driver where I wanted to go. Of course, he didn't recognize the name of the apartment complex, so I pulled out the address. I noticed a guy outside my window peering in, trying to look at the address, or so I assumed. I also gave this guy a puzzled/dirty look, and made sure that only the taxi driver could see the address. The guy just laughed and walked away. I was so on edge after this. Marissa called me while I was in the taxi and told me she was on her way to the bus station. I asked her if she had gotten my texts and she said no. I told her I had already bought the bus tickets. She was also unhappy because she had just wasted her money and time, and told her taxi driver to turn around. On top of this, I realized as I was in the taxi that I only had RMB 15 left, which wasn't enough for the taxi to take me back home. I told him this and he replied "ζδΉε?", which means "What should we do?" I told him I didn't know. Fortunately, he was nice enough to take me to a bus stop, so that I could take the bus back home. By this time I owed him RMB 19, but he only charged me RMB 13, so that I was able to use the remaining RMB 2 to pay for the bus. I felt really bad and stupid for having been in that situation, but I wasn't really thinking straight after what happened at the bus station. When I returned home, there were two strangers sitting on my couch. Marit was standing, talking to them. I asked her what was going on and she told me that this man and woman had showed up at the door and wanted to see her passport. I was very suspicious about this. They said something in Chinese to me that I didn't understand and I told them to hold on. I grabbed my computer and looked up the word they kept repeating. Apparently, they were investigators. I reluctantly gave them a copy of my passport and they wrote down the information on their sheets. I had them write down their names for me, just in case. After they got the information they wanted, they left. By this point, I was so exhausted and unnerved. I talked to Joey about it, who then also was worried. Marissa called me later on that evening and asked me if I wanted to spend the night in her dorm, since we had to get up at 4 a.m. the next day to catch the bus at 6:30 a.m. I agreed and headed over to her dorm after I packed and ate dinner. When I arrived, Marissa and Will were waiting for a call from Kailey to tell them that they were heading out to go clubbing. Marissa was planning on going out clubbing even though we had to get up really early. She left around 11 p.m. with Will and I headed to bed.
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