What's going on
"Can't we just go to Hong Kong when Daddy is at work?" he asked me earlier this week.
Our Beijing life seems so boring to Myles compared to our recent "vacation" to Hong Kong. We're still completely buried in the cleaning and unpacking business. Notice I didn't say progressing. Maybe penancing, if that is a word.
During the day, though, sometimes we do get out of the apartment, make a stop at a coffee shop and the grocery store, and then return home. If it sounds a lot like our Shenzhen life, it is, but in Shenzhen of course we knew lots of people, so trips to Starbucks and Carrefour were also social occassions.
In Hong Kong, we had a lot going on, but not all of it was fun. Myles seems to forget all the standing in line and waiting around we did while we were there. He's focussed instead on the fun stuff, like the playgrounds and museums, the parks and the malls.
The weather has warmed up a little, so he's been on his bike in the park near our apartment. And as soon as we get a handle on getting around, there's a Zoo trip in our near future. We are starting to get somewhat into a life here. I can't imagine how difficult this would be if I couldn't speak any Mandarin at all, or if I hadn't already lived in China for two and a half years. This would have been a much, much more difficult move. I would have totally felt stranded and alone.
Funny, too, though, that as I look around the apartment and around our area of Changping, I see the China I imagined I was moving to before I got here. It would have lived up to my very low expectations and pre-conceived notions about what it meant to live in China even as a foreigner. I hadn't had much exposure to the "expat package" life with the large houses and nannies and drivers and housekeepers and foreigners-only clubs before I got here. Nor had I seen the fabulous new apartment gardens of Shenzhen where China's newly rich live, with the manicured grounds and pools. I was pleasantly surprised, to say the least, by what I found there.
But Changping is different. There are surprises, for sure, like the coffee shop near the universities (an oasis for the foreign teachers that work there), and the bakeries that sell real sandwich bread (one of the big differences between North and South for sure). But most of this looks like the China I imagined, and the one imagined by people back home that wrinkle their noses and ask, "What's it like to live in China?"
Our Beijing life seems so boring to Myles compared to our recent "vacation" to Hong Kong. We're still completely buried in the cleaning and unpacking business. Notice I didn't say progressing. Maybe penancing, if that is a word.
During the day, though, sometimes we do get out of the apartment, make a stop at a coffee shop and the grocery store, and then return home. If it sounds a lot like our Shenzhen life, it is, but in Shenzhen of course we knew lots of people, so trips to Starbucks and Carrefour were also social occassions.
In Hong Kong, we had a lot going on, but not all of it was fun. Myles seems to forget all the standing in line and waiting around we did while we were there. He's focussed instead on the fun stuff, like the playgrounds and museums, the parks and the malls.
The weather has warmed up a little, so he's been on his bike in the park near our apartment. And as soon as we get a handle on getting around, there's a Zoo trip in our near future. We are starting to get somewhat into a life here. I can't imagine how difficult this would be if I couldn't speak any Mandarin at all, or if I hadn't already lived in China for two and a half years. This would have been a much, much more difficult move. I would have totally felt stranded and alone.
Funny, too, though, that as I look around the apartment and around our area of Changping, I see the China I imagined I was moving to before I got here. It would have lived up to my very low expectations and pre-conceived notions about what it meant to live in China even as a foreigner. I hadn't had much exposure to the "expat package" life with the large houses and nannies and drivers and housekeepers and foreigners-only clubs before I got here. Nor had I seen the fabulous new apartment gardens of Shenzhen where China's newly rich live, with the manicured grounds and pools. I was pleasantly surprised, to say the least, by what I found there.
But Changping is different. There are surprises, for sure, like the coffee shop near the universities (an oasis for the foreign teachers that work there), and the bakeries that sell real sandwich bread (one of the big differences between North and South for sure). But most of this looks like the China I imagined, and the one imagined by people back home that wrinkle their noses and ask, "What's it like to live in China?"
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