Do You Believe in Miracles?

What was once lost has now been found.

Do you believe in miracles?  I know I do.  This week started with a miracle for me, and then ended with another one.  I almost can’t believe my good fortune.

First of all, let me preface this story by saying that despite my lack of international traveling experience, I’m really not a travel novice.  I’ve been in almost every major American city, tons of small ones, more airports than I can count, more miles of interstate than I’d like to remember and I did make it to London and back with only a lost bag of hand sanitizer and lip gloss as casualties.  Yet this week I made not one but two rookie traveling mistakes, but was saved both times by the kindness of strangers.

First off on Monday, I went with a lovely librarian from Sichuan University named Yongmei to the Wenshu Buddhist temple.  We took a taxi across town at the tail end of rush hour, so we had plenty of time to chat with our friendly taxi driver.  He was the best driver I’ve had since I’ve been here, but I’m grading on how scary the ride is (he didn’t drive very fast).  He had a few questions for me about traffic in the United States, and we had a nice ride across town.  As I got out of the taxi, I heard a robotic voice say in English to be sure to take all your belongings with you when you leave.  I thought to myself, of course I have everything, but you know some people are stupid and leave stuff behind all the time.  Well that day I was the stupid one. 

An hour after strolling around the temple trying to figure out various Buddhist mysteries like why are the statues of the gods by the entrance so darn scary, we left to go to our next destination.  It was getting sunny so I opened my purse to get my sunglasses on only to find them gone.  I knew in an instant that I was the idiot who left their prescription sunglasses in a taxi in a major foreign metropolitan city, and that was that.   I had already mentally spent the $600 to replace them as soon as I got back to Phoenix (you can’t live through a summer there without sunglasses) by the time I mentioned to Yongmei what I did.  She immediately found the taxi receipt, called the dispatch office who confirmed that the super nice taxi driver had found them and would bring them to the office as soon as he had a break.  Yongmei then arranged a driver from the library to go get them (the office was very far away) and I had them back in my hands by Tuesday night.  Thank you travel miracle #1.

So fast forward to Friday.  I was spending a lovely day with a young library staff member named Shi, which included a stop at Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage, lunch of Sichuan snacks (although I didn’t eat this one), and then the Sichuan Provincial Museum.  We enjoyed seeing the sites but also comparing notes about life in our respective countries.  Shi is the awesome young woman who took me to the mall, Starbucks and Ikea last week because I  wanted to see where normal people liked to shop.  Anyway, we left the museum and took yet another scary taxi drive across town to a nice café.  We were just getting settled when I went to fetch my iPhone out of my purse so I could hook up to wifi when I realized it wasn’t in my purse.  I knew it immediately – I had left it on a bench in the museum. 

What a ridiculously stupid rookie move this was and I felt sick.  You don’t leave your phone anywhere, but certainly not in a fairly public space with lots of tourists.  Plus it was a needless loss because I didn’t even need to have it with me today. I’ve been carrying it around primarily so I could use the Chinese/English dictionary app.  However Shi’s English is practically perfect so I didn’t need it,  except when I was telling her about a café I found that had smoothies and bagels.  She didn’t know what a bagel was, so I tried looking it up in the dictionary app.  And then I somehow left the phone on the bench.  Major. Rookie. Mistake.

After emptying my purse to ensure it wasn’t hiding somewhere, I knew we had to go back to the museum.  We immediately dashed out of the café and down the street to try to hail a cab, which of course wasn’t as easy as we thought.  Taxi after taxi passed us, without their magic “available” light on.  While we were waiting, Shi called the museum office, but they told her they didn’t have any phones turned in.  We finally got a cab, and I endured yet another eyes-closed-pray-for-my-life ride across town.  Only this time it was eyes-closed-pray-for-my-iphone-to-not-be-gone-for-good ride.

When we arrived at the museum we ran up the stairs, through security and quickly went to the spot near the gift shop where we had sat earlier.  When we turned the corner we found three museum employees sitting on a bench who immediately flagged us down, one of them waving my iphone. I nearly wept with relief. I had been dreading not having a phone when I got back, not to mention paying hundreds of dollars to replace it (I’m pretty sure Apple Care doesn’t cover lost phones).   The museum workers told Shi that they remembered seeing me earlier sitting with Shi on the bench, as they don’t get many foreign visitors to their museum.  When they found the phone and it was in English they knew it was mine.  They thought I would call it to find it, but someone noted that it didn’t have service, so they decided to wait for us to come back, knowing that we would.  Miracle number two.

Shi and I marveled at my good fortune this week as we went back outside to hail yet another cab.  What were the chances that I would recover not one but two expensive lost items in one week?  And in such a huge city?  What I’m going to take away from this is that this is a wonderful reminder that people are basically good, no matter where they are.  Sometimes I lose track of my core belief that people are basically good, no matter where they are from.  From now on, I will be reminded of the goodness of people every time I put on my sunglasses or pull out my phone.  And we all know that that will be hundreds of times a day.  People are good.