Dear Friend

This is my friend of 10 years. His name is Amon. I have told the story of our meeting many times over the years because to me, it's such a fantastic story.

In 2002 with my then girlfriend LIsa, we headed from Canada to Chengdu to teach English to kids. We arrived in Hong Kong pretty much with the city name of Chengdu as the only idea about where we were going. We caught a bus to Guangzhou and the bus stopped at some big fancy hotel $230 USD a night but it was stinking hot and we'd been on a bus for 4 hours or something. All I wanted was a nice air conditioned room but Lis insisted that we go get train tickets so off to the train station we went. The square in front of the station was packed with people and there were long lines at almost all of the windows and not a word of English anywhere. I just wandered up to a window with no one at it and somehow walked away 10 minutes later with two tickets to I wasn't sure where.

When we were walking a little lady came to us and said in English "You come stay my hotel"
" How much?"
"200"
"Dollars?"
"No. RMB"
"OK let's go"

The hotel was OK although the 200 turned out to be 240. We headed down for some lunch and were confronted with a menu completely in Chinese. Enter our saviour, the waiter who spoke English. The man pictured with me. "Amon"

He looked after us every meal and confirmed the train tickets were in fact what we wanted. We were to depart on a Thursday and Amon insisted that he take us to the train station. It was stinking hot still. He also insisted that he carry Lisa's REALLY heavy suitcase and my guitar with a didgeridoo strapped to it. We got to the train station and there was a sea of people. He took us to the waiting room (carrying the stuff up to the first floor) left us to find out where to go.. He came back to say we were in the wrong place and had to go to first class. He took us there and then carried our stuff down two flights of stairs and then up two more to platform #2. Trouble was.. we were leaving from platform 3 and so down and up again still insisting on taking our stuff. In a lather of sweat he put our stuff in our carriage in the room for us.

The last thing we asked of this poor sweat soaked man was to contact our destination school and tell them when we would arrive in Chengdu because my attempt had only led to a lot of confusion. He did that for us and while he was talking to the school, he asked if they had any jobs there (which they did) and he went half way across the country and worked for the school. One of his first tasks was to teach us Chinese.

So here we are 10 years later and we have finally caught up again.