I am posting the following little incident, not because anything dramatic happens, but to give some peace to people who do a trip in the future. There is not much to it: it boils down to the fact that it is inevitable that there are going to be misunderstandings along the way. How you work them out together will have a significant influence on determining whether your relationship works out or implodes.
Yesterday wasn't so good. YaYa suggested that we visit a hot springs resort, located a hundred or so kilometres from Wuhan.
As an aside to whoever visits Wuhan in the future, this is a great trip: 180 RMB for the day, including transport there and back. It's only recently been constructed and it looks beautiful. One of the highlights was sitting in a cool pool, having tiny little fish come and nibble on our skin. It's meant to cleanse the skin and it's very ticklish *laughs*
On the way there, she sits in the front of the minibus and talks to the driver for three hours and the way back, does the same thing. She doesn't say a word to me the whole way there and not a word on the whole way back. It seemed to me that I might have gone and slept in the luggage compartment for all it mattered to her. Then when we arrived at the springs, she spent most of the time away from me. By the time we got back to Wuhan I was feeling pretty grumpy about the day as a whole. But when we got out of the bus, I made a decision to act cheerfully, and get out of this bad mood, and so we decided to go out to dinner and the night ended happily enough.
Anyhow I had a talk about the day, last thing in the night, via mobile phone text messages. She said that relation to the time we spent at the hot springs, she said that she enjoys swimming on her own. She also said that she wanted to take good care of my daughter, making sure that my daughter was not annoyed by any men, so her focus at the springs was with my daughter, rather than me. I was really impressed by the seriousness with which she cared about my daughter. And in relation to the time in the bus, she thought I wanted to read my book and she did not know the driver and so she felt that she needed to talk to him, as she was sitting next to him.
I had a think about what happened and I realised that I was the only foreigner there amongst hundreds of locals enjoying the resort. Wheverer you go, you have people saying, "lao wei, hello!" My woman is a quiet and reserved person and so probably part of it was that she felt awkward being with me, swimming about in our bathers together. And, I, for my part, had to keep reminding myself, she is not ashamed of me, she is only shy.
It doesn't matter. I just felt a bit disappointed about how the day went. Well hopefully today will be better.