knitwear

Ok I wrote this whole entry and didn’t save it, so from memory, this is what I have been doing while I knitted the milk, milk, lemonade, fudge bikini. So far, this bikini has been shared 120k times and got 2.8 mil views on Instagram. I have stopped reading the comments because it has found its way onto strange men’s FYP. They mostly comment gifs.

Visiting the Great Wall of China and falling in love for six hours

IDK how it works out that I got lost on a wall but I did. After getting onto the Great Wall via gondola, I was talking to a nice Malaysian family who were on holiday. They said they were walking down from tower five, I was like yeah sweet ok I will walk down from five after I go see all the other towers. I went for a wander and after a couple of hours, walked back to tower five to find that there was no way down. I looked around for a bit and found a sign and it said track down from tower two, but in my head I was like… the family said five. I don’t know why I trusted the family more than the actual signage, but I did.

I continued to wander across wall, until I bumped into a woman in full hiking kit. She had a pack, knee braces, walking poles, and a JBL speaker loudly playing some Chinese music. On my person, I had my beat-up Oroton bag containing a small bottle of water, my phone which dies after 1-hour, wired headphones and a pair of gloves my mum knitted me.

I used the translate app to ask how to get down, she grimaced and told me it was really difficult. I did have the thought, that if this track required poles and a soundtrack to make it down, I might not make it.

I think someone should make a calculator where you can plug in a list of inventory you have on your person, your MBTI and a location to give you an estimated time of survival in that particular situation. In hindsight, I was being very dramatic, but at the time I truly though my time was close to being up.

So following her advise, I started walking towards tower 2, lightly hesitant, looking back at tower 5, wondering how the family on holiday from Malaysia was going, but then I bumped into Sam. Sam was on my shuttle bus earlier that day, we hadn’t spoken on the bus but I was quick to say hey now. I told him I was lost, he looked slightly confused at this which is fair enough, but then said we could walk down together.

We talked on the way down, he told me that he was a PhD student who had studied in the UK and was now studying in Beijing. I told him that I was currently unemployed and didn’t really know how to get back to Beijing from where we were, he told me he could drive me. I kind of love him. He drove us back to Beijing, I knitted the first triangle of the bikini top, and then we had hotpot. I think he thought I was really stupid (fair enough and kind of right) because he offered to take me to the train station where I was going to catch my overnight train to Xi’an incase I got lost. He brought me a Metro card and we took the metro together to Beijingxi train station.

We hugged at the escalator and said goodbye. I was really sad to say goodbye after our six hours together, my heart sunk a little. I think my love language is acts of service. We’re friends on WeChat now though. I send him pictures of my knitting and bubble tea and he sends me pictures of his drawings from his weekly classes.

On the train I had a seat next to a lady who kept taking videos of me with filters on them. I fell asleep and woke up and she had put her jacket over me like a blanket.

Chance encounters on a bridge in Chongqing

Instagram is so beautiful. I was walking across a bridge and received an instagram message to be like hey I just saw you on this bridge, so the next day Sunriseinlee knitwear hung out. Together we got coffee and when we left this girl came up to us and was like I look these pictures of you and airdropped them to us - she was so sweet, I felt like we were having a RedNote moment. Then we walked around and then we had hotpot, we had pigs brain. Friends 4 ever. Sunriseinlee knitwear is too good.