It's not always what it seems

China. It is a place where nothing makes sense and everything makes sense all at the same time. Yesterday, sitting inside a Starbucks, still recovering from 2 days of food poisoning (the Chinese version of Weight Watchers), I stared at my Mandarin book and wondered how we were ever going to make it here. The language is essential if you want to have more than a two second conversation with anyone and let me tell you, it is hard. Procrastinating, I stared out the window and felt overwhelmed with the differences here. The garbage workers picking up trash with super-sized tweezers, the absence of traffic rules, the Chinese characters, the guy roasting sweet potatoes and sweet corn on an old rusted barrel, the street vendors littering the sidewalks with everything from underwear to DVDs. It was all a bit overwhelming so I turned up American Girl on my iPod, ordered another Carmel Macchiato, and tried to focus on studying for my first test.

This morning, I went for a run. Admittedly, my first run since we moved here. And something changed. I am not sure if it was the adrenaline from actually exercising or if it was the pollution on this particularly “foggy” morning, but China looked different. Woman exercising together, bent over laughing most likely from something their husbands did the night before. People commuting to work, looking like they had the same kind of hectic morning we did. Store owners opening their shops, putting their best products on display. People walking their dogs through the parks. China did indeed look different this morning. In fact, it looked familiar. It felt familiar. And once again, I was reminded of this…. On the surface, everything here is different. So different, that it smacks you in the face every time you walk out the door. But at the core, it is the same. They hold their kid’s hand when they cross the street, they work hard at whatever job they have found themselves in, they have their favorite resturant that they frequent on their way home from work when they are just too tired to cook, they buy celebrity trashy magazines at the newsstand to see what Lindsay Lohan is up to these days. People are just people, clothed with their heritage and culture.

So, we have two choices. We could choose to let those differences scare us into expat hiding inside our compound counting the days until we get to go "home" or we could find our new home here and set out to understand them and perhaps even embrace some of them. We have chosen the later. And let me tell you, it will no doubt be an interesting and fun ride.