Shanghai'd

2 year anniversary.

Today, Jan 17, 2008 marks our 2 year zhou nian in China. I really do remember our first day here like it was yesterday (and all those other cliches about time flying). Maybe it's the heightened sense of awareness you get when moving into a new environment. Making a concerted effort to focus on everything happening around you and catalog it somewhere in the back of the brain for later recall. Or maybe it's just because the chill of spending that first night in our frozen, heater-less shell of an apartment hasn't left my bones yet. This week's dreary weather has served as sufficient reminder.

In other ways, those two years feel like the longest of my life - in a decidedly good way! We've come a long LONG way from wasting an entire afternoon trying to accomplish the most remedial tasks like buying a mobile phone or ordering a bottle of water for delivery or even trying to iron clothes with a built-for-Chinese height ironing board.


It didn't take long to find someone (much shorter than us) to pay to do these chores.

After two years, the "fish out of water" type blog posts become pretty hackneyed. Honestly I don't feel like that kind of fish much anymore. There's always enough surprises and new things to discover to keep things interesting, you have to look a little harder to find them now. Riding the subway itself doesn't count as entertainment anymore!