A couple of days ago I suddenly got the idea to use an animated image as the header background. After I finished, it looked busy and flashy—the kind of thing that doesn't hold up to repeated viewing.
There's a childhood friend I've known since we were little. We grew up together and stayed close from primary school through middle school and vocational school. We were never in the same class, but every break we were together. One memory still makes me laugh.
When we went to school for freshman registration, my dad drove the two of us to the roadside at the village entrance to catch a coach. At the village entrance, the shop owner—the one who takes reservations for seats and calls the bus station—told us the Guangzhou bus had just left. Buying a ticket there cost 10 yuan more than at the station; that was how the shop made its money. So we ran from the village entrance to the high-speed rail station, which took an hour. By then it was already 11 a.m.
At the high-speed rail station, we were told the Guangzhou tickets were sold out. We had to go to a nearby coach station instead. My dad took us to eat something before we got on the bus. While we waited in the terminal, he also bought us snacks in case we got hungry—the ride from the village to school took five hours. By the time we boarded, it was noon.
The moment I stepped onto the bus, I felt uneasy. Before that, I had always wanted to get away from my parents. I should have been happy to finally be far from them, but what I felt was mostly reluctance. I looked back at my dad, and a rush of feelings came over me.
We had hoped we wouldn't arrive in Guangzhou too late—it was an unfamiliar place, and we still had to register. But after all the morning trouble, it was almost 6 p.m. when we reached school. The whole way there we were anxious, worried that the teachers might have already left. We ran from the subway station to the school. Only then did we realize we had remembered the registration time wrong: we had arrived a day early. The two of us had rushed all the way from our hometown to Guangzhou for nothing.
After I started working, we gradually lost touch; everyone was busy with their own lives. Mostly, during Chinese New Year, we'd go back to our hometown and visit each other's houses. A few days ago, in a group chat that had been quiet for a long time—several people from our school, all fairly close back then—there were eight of us, and now only three are in Guangzhou, including me. I invited the other two over for dinner. One couldn't make it because of work, so just the two of us ate.
I made corn and pork bone soup, blanched shrimp, garlic scapes with pork, and fish. I don't know what kind of fish it was, but it tasted good.
After dinner, we walked around the residential compound nearby. We saw people playing basketball and really wanted to join, but the court charges a fee. We ended up talking about the days we played basketball together in school.
I took this one secretly during the day today. I wanted to go up but didn't dare, and in the end I still went up. I guess I haven't learned my lesson.