Month Two In Shanghai

Welcome to my new blog!

Most of you reading this have been receiving notes from me with updates on our family's move to Shanghai, and if you haven't, well, I don't think I could do an adequate recap. But I hope you'll enjoy reading about our travel adventures and quirky stories about daily life for an American family in China.

I'll try to do regular updates as often as I can even if it's just a short observation or random thought of the day. My latest tribulations have to do with trying to learn Mandarin. I know, I said I wasn't going to bother, that my brain was too exhausted from struggling to learn Spanish in Madrid, but I signed up for lessons anyway. It would be nice to be able to talk to my driver - besides being a fabulous employee, he seems like a really nice guy but I can't even comment on the weather, let alone explain any plans beyond my next trip to the grocery store.

I'm also spending some time taking tours around the city and other day trips to try and get to know the area and see more of the "real" China outside of our little expat bubble. Now, I was impressed with the amount of Old World sights to see in Europe, not just the historic structures (the castles, the cathedrals, etc), but also in the quaint ways some people still lived their day to day lives. Well...it still is the old world in China.

Yes, Shanghai has it's big, modern skyscrapers and lots of business people occupying them, but down at street-level, many of the people still live as you would expect they lived a century ago - and not in a quaint way, they are just poor. Although it's kind of sad, it's really fascinating and I'm really in no position to judge if they are unhappy or feel deprived - it could be a case of you don't miss what you never had and they just don't know anything different.

I'll try to remember to put some pictures on the website of the lanes of Shanghai. That's what they call the alleyways where the really old homes are. I only wish I had a camera with me when I'm out running in the morning - I typically see people pass me on their bicycles carrying live chickens or slaughtered pigs, then there are the old folks out "exercising" in their pajamas and the construction workers squatting on the sidewalks eating their breakfast they bought from vendors who cook on carts right on the street. They do a lot of squatting - the Chinese must have quads of steel. I'll tell you about the public bathrooms sometime.

So then the rest of my time is taken up with the kids and their school activities (I'm the room Mom for both their classes) and marathon training. Now that the weather has FINALLY cooled off, my running all of a sudden feels really great. I had my first 20 mile run this past Saturday and it went really well, so that was very encouraging. Now as long as I don't contract any more diseases, I'll be good to go (pneumonia kept me from running the Barcelona marathon last spring). I find it shocking that we've been here for over two months and the only sickness so far was Ian's sniffle a few weeks ago. I've been real fanatical about hand-washing since we've been here.

Russ's job is going well over all, though not without it's headaches, of course. He's been doing lots of traveling - Korea last month, he's in Singapore now, and is heading to Australia next month. And in between all his work trips, I'm busy booking holiday travel plans so the poor guy is going to feel like he spends half his life in airports.

I'll wrap up this entry with my thought of the day. This morning I took a tour of the markets downtown and wound up wandering down several of these lanes and their old, run-down houses and you can't help but reflect and ask yourself: how much stuff do I really need?