One Week Later

In a few hours, it will have been exactly a week since I got to China.  It feels like considerably longer than that.  For the first time, I've realized that I am tired, and I've tried to take stock of what I've done in order to figure out why.  So here's a short (and certainly not exhaustive) list of what has happened since Delta Flight 181 from Detroit touched down at Shanghai Pudong International Airport:

(in no particular order)

• I have read through about 3,500 out of the 65,000 little Kindle-pages that constitute the first four books in the Game of Thrones series.  In English...not sure that stuff could possibly be translated into Chinese.
• I underwent my first ever ultrasound.  Probably not as cool as if, you know, I could see something living inside me.
• I have been to each of the three Apple Stores in Shanghai (one of them twice).
• I started work.  I am one of 3 waiguoren (foreigners) in the office, so the chatter is almost exclusively in Chinese.  So it doesn't look like I'll be having many water cooler conversations about football on Monday mornings.
• The clerk at China Unicom, after providing me with several choices for my Chinese cell number, laughed at my random selection (My guess is because it had the number "4" in it.  The character for the number 4 and the character for 'death' have the same pronunciation in Mandarin, so naturally the number 4 is considered unlucky here.  Hey, it's no more arbitrary than our aversion to the number 13).
• With me sitting awkwardly in the same room, my future roommates spent part of an afternoon discussing whether or not to choose me or another girl to live in the final room of the apartment.  They chose me.
• I have discovered that coffee is more expensive in Shanghai than it is in the United States.
• At dinner one night, about 80% of the restaurant's waitstaff huddled around my table after discovering that I spoke Chinese.  They asked me to translate various service-related concepts from Chinese to English so they could better serve their customers.  For example, they were desparate to know how to ask someone how he wanted his meat cooked in English, and what the three basic choices were ("rare," "medium," and "well done").  Upon hearing the answer they literally shrieked with exuberance.  This, of course, means that before my heroic intervention many poor English-speakers were getting meat cooked randomly.
• One of the waitresses asked me if I was married.  Pretty sure she was 19.  And would have said yes if I had asked her to marry me on the spot.  I didn't.
• I went on a run along Suzhou Creek; several children watched me go by with looks of abject horror, as if a big, wet, monster was rampaging through the city.
• When I told a supermarket employee, in Chinese, that I was looking for sugar, she pointed me in the direction of candy bars.  Oh well.
• I have heard "My Heart Will Go On" playing on three separate occasions.  No Celine though -- just that music.
• I have been invited to my roommate's bluegrass show on Friday night.
• I have found that when the craziness of moving halfway across the world, and dealing with the endlessness of Chinese beauacracy dies down, two things are true.  1 - I think I'm going to have a blast here.  This place is freaking cool.  And different.  And there are some cool places, places that I would never otherwise get to go to, that surround it.  2 - I do miss home.  Being able to chat electronically with friends and family has made the transition infinitely easier.  And while the prospect of exploring this brave new world for a year or longer is unbelievably exciting, so is the knowledge that I have a life waiting for me back home.  It's like Ernie's song from Sesame Street about going to the moon....okay, for those of you who for some reason don't remember it, here: Ernie.  I've said this before, and I'll say it again, but being here has underlined how lucky I am perhaps more than anything I've ever done.  There's something incredibly special about being able to do what I'm doing, and still have a firm point, a true north on which I can rely to be there whenever this crazy adventure ends.  The more I remind myself of that, the more I will be able to commit myself wholly to this place for as long as I am here.

On to Week 2....