Timely Meetings

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When I purchased our tickets to Xiamen, I couldn't believe how inexpensive they were. I reasoned that it must be because it's the off-seasonand they were trying to fill planes. Well, either I was wrong about the travel season or their strategy really worked because the flight to Shanghai was packed. When the airline agent asked if we wanted to sit together, I was a little bewildered, but not as bewildered as she looked when she attempted to fulfill my request. Eventually, she did and we were soon boarded and on our way.
We had three of the four seats in the center aisle. The fourth was occupied by a young man named Kent, a native of Fujian province -- the same province Xiamen is located in. After we figured out the seating arrangement, we got to talking with him. It seemed we were on opposite pathways, he visiting his homeland and we leaving ours. We had quite the interesting time -- he practicing his English and we brushing up on our Chinese -- but we learned quite a lot about Xiamen and about what to expect culturally. The biggest takeaway was that the residents of Xiamen are culturally very similar to the residents of Taiwan, which was a great relief to us since the majority of our experience with Chinese was in Taiwan.
It is easy to get frustrated when situations don't turn out as you anticipate (at least that is how I operate) but there often is a grander scheme at work. Close quarters on a plane aren't pleasant (after nine hours of sitting, my butt is numb) but they can lead to connections with people 0ne might not reach out to if they were across an aisle. That said, here's to hoping there isn't a similar letdown in regards to the culture of Xiamen.

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