North-South Lake / Chinese women

My story with Emily is like a lot of experiences I have had in China: in many ways frustrating and incomprehensible, but yet a fond memory. I had gotten the number for several different Chinese girls and spent one week taking each one out on dates, trying to see if I wanted to date any of them. The first one, Zhulang something, was not too attractive. Went to a nice Thai restaurant, and she was spitting bones on the ground from the fried frog. Pretty frequent Chinese custom apparently but nonetheless not too appealing. The next girl, Ju Yao, didn't speak a single word of English, making communication slightly challenging to say the least. My Mandarin is barely understandable at this stage, although I'm doing my best to add a few words a day.

Emily was the third and last one, and definitely the best. She was 23, adorable, and a really fun chick. She brought a friend with her to translate our first night at dinner, and should have spotted the foreshadowing. We ended up agreeing to date later that night, I was really into her, but communicating was pretty difficult. A few days later, we went to North-South Lake with some of my teacher friends, a really great outing. We had my friend Peter's girlfriend, Vicky Gung, with us - helped translate. Realized her English was almost non-existent, although she could say a few basic things and was trying really hard.

North-South Lake was really beautiful, some 2 hours outside of Jiaxing by bus. We hiked around the mountain for a while, grabbed lunch, then rented some boats and chilled on the water all afternoon. Really relaxing and pleasant day, and me and Emily were getting along really well. A week later she broke up with me though, citing difficulty in communication. Her text was in Pinyin Chinese and I had to get it translated since I couldn't understand it, so I accepted her point. Shame, I liked her a lot, but life goes on. My Chinese has gotten better since then, but it progresses extremely slowly. Oh well, life goes on. The single picture I have of her is pretty awkward too, she seems to have a phobia of looking at the camera. C'est Lavie..