The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

First contact was made through email and was very slow.  As in, a new email every other day.  Thus, setting up a meeting time took almost as long as getting in contact with Amber in the first place (Amber, if you haven’t already assumed so, is my conversation partner). 

Eventually we got a time pinned down.  Monday night, 8:30, in the BLUU.  To make sure we had some way of finding each other once there, I emailed her my phone number. 

Now directly before that time I had Quidditch practice out in the Commons, so after practice I rushed back to the dorm to get a shower and I ended up getting to Market Square almost ten minutes late.  

Amber had not replied to my last email before I had to leave, so I wandered around up there for a good five minutes, with no idea where she was.  Eventually I grabbed a glass of apple juice, because I wasn’t hungry, and sat down to watch football.  I did this for around the next fifteen minutes, hoping that she would either call or text me.  Once I had finished my apple juice and seen the Broncos score a couple touchdowns, I made a few more laps around the Square before deciding to head back to the dorm. 

When I got back I opened up my email on my laptop, because for some reason it won’t work on my phone.  At that point I saw two emails from Amber sitting in my inbox, informing me that I had given her the wrong phone number.  I had put a five instead of a six.  Most unfortunate. 

Now equipped with her number, I ran back to the BLUU—because, surprisingly she was still there thirty minutes after our scheduled meeting time—back up the stairs to Market Square and made a few more laps around.  Still couldn’t find her.  So I called her and found out that she was downstairs.  In the BLUU.  Not Market Square.  The BLUU.  In which Market Square happens to reside on the second floor.  For some reason my brain decided to make the BLUU mean Market Square, creating a lot of unnecessary confusion on my part.

Having finally resolved this issue, I found Amber sitting outside Union Grounds and we sat down for our chat.

Over the next hour we covered pretty much all the basic topics for a first meeting.  Names, obviously, family, cultural differences, likes, hobbies, all that good junk.  I learned about China’s policy on the number of children in families while Amber learned the term “jet lag”—by which I also found out that China is thirteen hours ahead of Texas.  We also found we shared a mutual enjoyment of Harry Potter, although that’s about all we shared as far as movies and television went.

Amber’s English was very good.  She could make herself clearly understood in most instances and I think she could understand what I was saying.  Of course, she may have simply been extremely polite and made it seem like she understood it all.  In that case though, she would have to be a very good guesser on some of our topics. 

Either way it was a most interesting discussion and I am glad I was able to find her, even though it took me far longer than it should have.  I enjoyed the glass of apple juice though.