Mystery Dinner

Hi Everybody!
yes, it's me, remember? I know, I have not written in ages...

I am busy as can be with my studies. Just imagine, as a beginner, I have to memorize between 25 and 40 new words each day, between the 2 different lessons we have. On top of that, the hanzi writing of said words, read the texts of that lesson, assimilate the grammar, and then do homework. It is more than enough!
And as much as I really enjoy writing stories every day, it takes a chunk of my time, and before I know it, the afternoon is half gone, and still homework to do! So I had to cut short on my leasure activities.
Right now, I am revising all the vocabulary of 30 lessons. We will have our final semester exams on June 29, 30 and July 1st. After that, we still have 5 days of classes. Don't ask me why, I can't figure it out, either.... that's the Chinese way. Universal explanation for just about anything....

Well, Wednesday, I had an interesting day. At about 5 pm, the phone rang, and a guy was on the line, a certain Tony, as he introduced himself. He greeted me by my name and seemed to know me somehow. He suggested we meet for dinner together with his girlfriend, Miranda.
And what would be a time suitable for me? I tried hard to recollect who the heck is Tony, how come I can't remember him? Where did I meet a Tony? Nothing at all came to mind, while I told him that I'd be delighted to have dinner with them, and yes, how about 7 pm, outside the university gates? "OK, let's meet there at 7 tonight....."

I went early and hung around the gate, a little to the side, waiting for who would show up, and hoping to finally recover my lost memory on Tony. Finally, with about 10 minutes over the time,
I saw a guy steering his path towards me, and saying "hi" and "how are you, so nice to see you". Well, seeing him did not help at all, I could simply not make out how he knew me. I was certain I had never seen his face before. Yet, somehow, he seemed familiar! If only I could grasp the missing piece of the puzzle... but nothing... it remained elusive! I decided I was not going to ask him pointblank about my lack of recollection of our previous encounter, I was going to figure this out by myself.... hopefully!

After 5 more minutes, his girlfriend Miranda also showed up, released from her afternoon classes. I was absolutely positive that I had never seen her face before, either! But both seemed congenial and nice, so I decided to just keep going.

They suggested we go to a restaurant they had discovered some weeks before, just a few hundred yards from where we were, called Homecooking.com! It sounded like a very strange and funny name for a restaurant to me.... A "dot com"!?

It turned out it is a truly charming place, nice decor, nice food! We got a table right next to a low built fish basin, with gold fish and water plants, and a pleasant, gently splashing waterfall.

Dinner went very well.
These two, Tony and his girlfriend, Miranda, are just about the brightest students I have met in China. Charming, excellent English, and very ambitious, too. If they going this way, they will end up becoming very successful, in China or else where. They told me about their studies, their lives here, their families, some cultural background of their home towns. Tony wants to become the CEO of his own future online business, and Miranda wants to be an interpreter. They asked me lots of questions about my experience in China with our business, and my life in general.
We had a wonderful time and the restaurant was a good discovery for me, a Chinese restaurant with a huge assortment of quality dishes and a very pleasant setting. And all that inside campus of the university across the street from ours! We dined til 11:30 pm and hardly saw the time fly! Needless to say, I am glad I went! We decided we will do this again.

Well, even after we parted, I still had no idea why and how I knew Tony.
I needed to sleep over it and let my on-board computer, commonly known as brain, do its job of information retrieval. It worked...

Finally, as soon as I opened my eyes the next morning, it all became clear to me. No wonder I could not remember who the heck Tony was, leave alone his girl friend, Miranda. I had never met them before!

About 3 weeks ago, somebody called me one night and said he was a student at our university. They were making a video for a TV show, on the topic of foreigners studying Chinese in Beijing, and would I be willing to participate? I agreed. So then, a few days later, I got a message, convening everybody on their candidate list for a briefing that next weekend. Said Tony was not at that briefing, he had to be only in charge of making the contact calls.
It then so turned out that I did actually not qualify for that TV session, because they only wanted fluent speakers, not beginners. I thought it was no big deal, and quite understandable, as they were not planning on providing interpreters for this show. The format does not allow that. So I did not get to participate in the interview. I went home from the briefing and forgot the whole thing.

Anyhow, then I got a call from Tony again the following day, appologizing for having bothered me to go to that meeting. He said it was a misunderstanding on his part, as he had assumed my Chinese was fluent. Some classmate of mine had given him my number and failed to also mention that I was just a beginner. All that talking between Tony and myself only occurred over the phone. And we really only talked briefly.

So, then I got the phone call yesterday, and a Tony talked to me as if we had known each other forever, and said, "Hey how about dinner tonight?" LOL