ur classmates made an appointment with a foreign tutor to go to Beijing Botanical Garden together on 14^th May.

Several days before the outing, I began to pay much attention to the weather forecast. The weather was not steady and changed fast. I kept praying that this Saturday would be a good day. It finally turns out that today is a perfect day for outdoor activity. It is warm but not skin-burning. A soft wind touches the leaves tenderly. Varied and vivid flowers are doting the neat lawns along the lanes. The branches of the trees are concealed by bushy leaves. The leaves are shining in the reflection of the sun. The garden is full of visitors with happy smiling faces.  All together, they form amazing beautiful scenery in the Botanical garden.

As planned, there should be 15 participants, but some of them are absent temporarily because of some emergency personal issues.  Finally, we gather a total of 12 people including 10 adults and 2 children at the gate of the garden. We begin to walk towards the musical fountain. From quite a distance, we see the waters are dancing to the music. How excited the children are! They run quickly around the fountain and play with the gushing waters from the ground.  Our tutor even challenges his girlfriend to compete who one can stand at the exit of the water for the longest when the music stops and water is waiting for the next turn to gush out.

After we take enough pictures around the fountain, we head toward the deep part of the garden. Densely covered leaves make the lanes shady. We talk casually with the tutor along the lanes. The atmosphere is quite harmonic and happy. We are excited to have a chance to speak in English with a native speaker. Even the two children positively show their English songs to our tutor and make us adults laugh brightly. When the time runs nearly twelve, we decide to find a place for a picnic.

It’s not easy to find a proper place because the suitable places seem to all be occupied. But finally we find a perfect lawn with shade and enough space. Then we settle down there, open bags and take out foods. One of the classmates asks me: “Hi, Liu. Why did you ask us to bring meat here in your email? At your asking, I really brought a lot of meaty foods today.” I’m surprised: “What? Did I ask you to bring meat today in my email?” She confirms: “Yes. You did. You asked us to bring meat by ourselves.” It turned out that she misread the word “meal” as “meat”. We laugh and ask her whether she likes to eat meat so much that she misreads “meat” instead of “meal”. While we adults still share the delicious foods and tell more funny stories, the two children are already full and run actively to and fro around us. One of them is a 7 year-old girl. She suddenly shouts to our tutor: Shuai Ge (cool brother) and points to his girlfriend: Shuai Mei (cool sister). The little girl follows her to repeat the same. That makes all of us laugh loudly. How ingenious the girl is! She gives a truth which no one of our adults could speak out straightly to avoid being thought a flatterer.