China Reunion

This past week I got to have a Yichang reunion in America with my good friends. Marty and Selena Pagano, who lived with me in Yichang from 2004 to 2006, now live in Minneapolis but they were in Indiana visiting some friends and relatives. Katie drove out from Illinois and Carma, who also used to live in Yichang, came out from Colombus, Ohio. We all met on the north side of Indianapolis (glad Indiana is the "Crossroads of America" and that everyone decided to come to my state!). It'd been more than two years since I'd seen Marty and Selena and now they have two children--Yllana, who is a little over 2, and Leila who is a month old. It was so nice to get a chance to see everyone again and get to catch up. We were just missing Mindy. Mindy is back in the States, but sadly Indiana isn't a crossroad when you live in Connecticut.



Here we all were back in 2004 when we traveled to Guilin.





Now in 2008 (minus Mindy). Yllana made it in the picture, but Leila was asleep in her car seat and it was better that she not be disturbed (for her sake and for her parents' sake).





Here's a picture with Leila.



Marty and Selena were staying with some other former China residents, Shawn and Kim Swingle, who live in Indianapolis. Shawn and Kim went to China on the same summer team that I did back in 2001 (Marty and Carma were also on that summer trip, Katie met Kim the next year on the 2002 summer trip). They got married the following year and then moved to Tianjian for the next five years. We found this relatively-authentic Chinese restaurant in Indianapolis with spicy Sichuan food. When we first looked at the menu we were all a little dissapointed, but when the waitress heard us talking in Chinese she told us there was a separate "real" Chinese food menu. I think the owner and the waitresses were rather stunned to have seven white Americans come in who could all speak Chinese and who'd all lived in China and who all wanted really spicy food. Yllana even says "ni hao" (hello) and counts in Chinese and loves spicy food.

The Chinese man standing in the back is Steven, a good friend of Marty and Selena. Steven worked his way out of the coal mines in his village in China, got into college, moved to Shang Hai, improved his English enough to come to the States, got a master's degree at the University of Minnesota (where he lived with Marty's parents for about a month), and is now working in Colombus, Indiana so he decided to come up and meet us.


Another interesting note . . . in the winter of 2004, Katie, Carma, and I traveled to Thailand. While we were at the King's Palace in Bangkok, we randomly ran into Shawn and Kim Swingle . . . in Thailand! "It's a small world afterall . . . "