China pt. 1

China…was a very challenging port. Not only was the language barrier significantly difficult, but I also had to hike an extremely steep great wall after a night of scorpion wine, go 3 days without a shower or change of socks, and confront mortality. The first two were really not bad, but the last was awful and sad. My friend Vin’s roommate was killed by a drunk driver the first night in Hong Kong. It was a real blow to my group in Beijing, because Vin was with us and we had to deal with that on top of trying to navigate our way through an often-frustrating, largely confusing country. I almost don’t want to go into details about Kurt, because it is just so heartbreaking. Someone so young, with friends and family back home who were so eagerly waiting for his return have to settle for one too early and too shocking than I can even fathom. I keep denying to myself that I won’t ever run into him in the hallway or joke around in Vin’s room at 3 in the morning, but the reality keeps piercing through my shield of avoidance and it is like a freezing waterfall on my heart. I wish there was some way I could fly back in time and push him out of the way, delay him leaving the ship by a few seconds, anything. Things like this just make me think the world is completely unfair—why did the driver live and Kurt not? Who deserves such heartache? I have to throw my hands up at the end of the day because to even try to put this incident within a moral framework is wholly futile. The existentialists and I have something in common at the moment in finding this all just absurd. I have to write about the fun China stuff later because to put it right after this would just be peculiar.