Love in the cracks.

Perhaps what I love most about BLCU is the diversity of culture you find here. Name a country, any country, and I'm pretty sure we have it. In my class alone, we're all either: Canadian, American, Mexican, British, Danish, Swedish, Colombian, Italian, or French. And while I like the melting-pot feel of the campus here, I guess there's still nothing like the Chinese, or, to be more specific, Chinese-Filipinos.

For the past week we've been here, we didn't really run into any of them. At first, I was like, oookay, it's not like I came here to meet my own kind anyway. But after a week, I started to sound like a baby, "Where in the world are those Chinese-Fils??" I couldn't believe that there weren't much around, coz even in Manila, all I've heard was how many of us go to Beijing to study. It got to the point that we constantly kept our ears peeled for anyone speaking a bit of Tagalog.

Needless to say, I was pretty glad to hear that some guys were organizing an initial dinner for Chinese-Fils. I was a bit hesitant to go at first though, but I figured, what have I got to lose? And I'm so glad I went. We met a whole bunch of people, some we've seen around but didn't know they were like us, some we've never seen, and others from different nearby universities, like Tsinghua Univ and Peking Univ. And it was so cool to see so many familiar faces from uni back home--I counted at least 10 people I went to uni with, and in the same college too. In all, I think we were about 70 or so.

The organizer arranged for some 黑车 to bring us to the restaurant. Oh, we had dinner at this hotpot place near school, and it was fab. Too bad I was sleepy, and we had to leave with the first batch; the others were heading to this party place somewhere. Next time.

Most of the time, I don't feel like I belong, even with Chinese-Fils. You know me, always holding close to my Canadian roots. So I never thought I'd say this, but how I missed being around Chinese-Fils! It felt like home to hear the chatter of Chinese+English+Tagalog words. For once, it felt right to be Chinese-Fil-Canadian.