I just spent four days in a small, windowless room in a nondescript office block in the decidedly untouristy end of Hangzhou, interviewing 60 or so people, mostly university students wanting to study abroad. After about the third day, it becomes a bit surreal. Following the exam script becomes a meditative chant. Out of body experiences are not uncommon. Nor is forgetting your own name.  Words start to lose their meaning and become a wall of sound. Kind of like Phil Spector for the linguistic set.

The spartan view from my chair in my tiny, windowless room. I appreciated the minimalist greenery.

I’ll be revisiting that sitting meditation this coming weekend, with two more days of interviews booked here in Shanghai. In between, every single day is crammed so full that I’m not sure how I’ll manage. The workload is already spilling over into the following week. I’m not quite sure if I’ll have a day off before I fly home in mid-June. Seriously.

You know how I was technically unemployed for most of the past year? How I alternated sporadic jaunts to exotic locales like, um, Zhengzhou or Hefei or Hangzhou or Dalian with long mornings of lazy, experimental cookery and languid protests of aimlessness? Yeah, well, that’s done.

Sometime in late April, I was unexpectedly headhunted. The good kind, not the one where you don’t get to keep your skull and its contents. Apparently my guanxi was positively humming with superpower vibes. People who knew people who knew people high up in my old job (the one that vanished last June) contacted me and the next thing I knew, I was in wholly charge of setting up a brand new alternative after-school program and summer camp for 6-12 year olds.

I believe the title I was given is Co-Dean (not to be confused with Codeine), working in conjunction with a quietly pleasant retired college headmaster/ex-Red Army soldier who speaks as much English as I do Chinese (though he’s reportedly fluent in Russian, which could come in handy).  I’m in charge of academics and teachers; he’s in charge of everything else. They’re hiring a translator to be our go-between.

The last time I taught kids full time, this is what happened

To be honest, it’s incredibly exciting. Over endless refills of pu’er tea and sunflower seeds in a teahouse cubicle (do those little rooms have a name? the ones with a curtain drawn across the front for privacy?), I was informed that this brand new start-up program was mine to mold and shape and tweak as I see fit. They wanted an English immersion creative community, they said, a place where the neighbourhood kids could go after school and not just be stuck in their high rise apartments doing homework and playing video games alone while their parents were at work.  Learning English would be a pleasant, natural afterthought, as the main focus was to be to counteract the deadening effects of the rote-learning at school.  My suggestions of organic gardening, art, story telling, crafts and creative journalling were all met with enthusiastic nods.

And then they said, go to it. Can the summer’s curriculum be ready by the 25th of May? I nodded, my awareness of time and space being rather hazy at best.

Also, they said, we would like you to hand-pick the staff so you only work with people who share your vision. Again, I nodded. That would be nice, I thought, conveniently forgetting that this would involve days of interviewing dozens of applicants.

Also, we would need you to train that staff, to make sure they’re up to your standards, they added. I smiled and nodded again, bobbing like a Weeble who wobbled but didn’t have the sense to fall down.

Training teachers– not so hard. Preparing 3 days of workshop materials from scratch– hmmm.

Also, they added, can this all be done by June?

I nodded, smiled, and got to work. That was at the beginning of May, when I signed my contract.

I should also note that when I enthusiastically agreed to take on the commitments of this more-than-full-time gig, I still had about a dozen other prior commitments on my plate: 6 days of intense interviewing in May alone (mostly away in Hangzhou); unknown quantities of weekly essays to be marked, the last bits of my third and final walking tour that needed to be researched, written and photographed; an out-of-the-blue commissioned blather piece on a previous tour I wrote (now available on iTunes! Link coming soon!) for a local magazine; and one last blast of high school language expert fame leading a writing workshop down in Qibao (a command performance, I’ve been told).

In a moment of sheer lunacy, I very nearly signed up for a month of early morning Chinese classes, thinking it’d be handy when attempting to communicate with my lovely Codeine. I mean, co-dean.  Doug, thankfully, talked me out of that one.

Although I’ve got more work to do than I can even fathom right now, I feel strangely okay. To be honest, I’m actually kind of happy. The aimlessness and low-level depression I’d been plagued with during my year of underemployment has retreated and I feel excited and inspired. I loved teaching my university-aged students (and am actually still tutoring one of them a few hours a week– add that to the work pile!) but I can’t say I ever felt excited about teaching academic or business English. The last time I felt this excited about researching and plotting out curriculum was…hmmm… back in Turkey when I taught kids. Hey, coincidence. Go figure.

See how happy (and thin! and young! My god!) I looked back then?

This is what grade 7 looks like in the wilds of central Anatolia

Let's get a close up on all that enthusiasm!

Shall I introduce Chinese kids to the wonders of sprouting garlic?

Here’s to re-embarking on a diverged path! Hopefully I’ll be able to keep my health and sanity intact for the next month.

I May Have Just A Wee Bit Too Much on My Plate is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

Doug says I look beatific in my new passport photo

I’m still Canadian.

I say this with a certain degree of relief because, well, until yesterday my passport had been in the hands of the Canadian Consulate in Shanghai and I was getting a very strong impression that they were on the verge of revoking my citizenship because… because… well, do they even need a reason?

My background is dubious enough as it is, without factoring in my shifty gaze and chameleon-like need to  reinvent myself every year or so (hey, remember my buzz-cut platinum blond faux-lesbian days in London?).  All those stamps with Arabic writing on them? All those Chinese visas?  That Burmese stamp? All those wildly disparate home addresses and jobs, all in just the past 5 years? Dodgy.

I’ve been living and working and traveling abroad since, um, 1994. That’s 18 years, come September. I think I got my first passport in 1993 though, when I was going through my asexual-groupie phase, following bands down to Seattle. Did I ever tell you how Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil once asked me to go clubbing with him but I couldn’t because I was only 18 (3 years under-age in the US)? Yeah.

I should be in the middle of my 4th 5-year passport by now. I’ve just received my 6th. Canadian passports are valid 5 years, but I’ve never been able to use the full five years as most countries insist on it being valid for at least 6 more months in order to let you in. If you need a work permit, you need at least a full year.

Also, those lovely 5 year passports have an adorably small number of pages (my last one had 24 pages, but the first 5 pages weren’t even usable as they had other things going on, like my photo and personal data or a bunch of small type telling me what to do if it’s stolen), with no page extensions allowed. Technically, I had 19 stampable pages.

Do you have any idea how many stamps and full-page visas a girl will go through when doing the following, between October 2008 and April 2012?

Canada–>USA–>Canada–>Mexico–>Belize–>Guatemala–>El Salvador–>Honduras–>Nicaragua–>Costa Rica–>USA–>Canada–>China (initial full-page tourist visa, converted to full-page work visa a month later, then another full-page tourist visa to bridge gap while 2nd full-page work visa was being arranged)–> Indonesia (full page)–>China–>HongKong/Macau–>China–>Canada–>China (with new work visa)–>Burma (full page)–>China–>Cambodia (full page)–>China (with new work visa)–>Canada–>Sri Lanka–>China–>Thailand–>China.

By August of last year, I was down to only 2 non-sequential empty pages, with a few scattered partial pages. Coming back from Sri Lanka, I was chewed out by the check-in woman in Bangkok for not having enough blank pages. According to her, what I was doing was illegal and I could be prevented from flying, even though re-entering China didn’t require a full page and I already had a page set aside for Chinese entry/exit stamps. China is wonderfully methodical, placing all stamps in neat lines next to each other.  Makes it easier to keep track of the errant laowai.

To make sure that my last two precious pages weren’t casually annihilated by a wayward entry stamp, I had to take desperate measures.  Post-It Notes are, thankfully, not in the ‘defacing your passport’ category.

Apologies for PhotoBooth mirroring. Can't be arsed to go get proper camera.

Since I was down to just one free page (Thailand claimed one of my 2 Post-It Note pages), I knew I had to renew before my current work visa expired. Sure, I had a spare year and a half left on it and it was annoying to be forking over $150 every few years unnecessarily, but a Canadian must do what a Canadian must do.

This would be, what, Passport #4? (or #5?) in the past 18 years?

Let me tell you all about renewing your passport in Shanghai.

I went to the consulate over the Qing Ming Festival long weekend, as that was the only time my co-Canadian, Jeannie, was able to come over from the wilds of Wuxi to get hers renewed.

It also meant that every photo studio in the city was closed, their owners off sweeping their ancestors’ graves somewhere. If you were an ordinary mortal, this would be no big whoop as a passport photo is pretty standard. That’s what metro station photo booths are for.

Unless you are Canadian, of course.

What you need if you are Canadian:

A highly irregular photo size, known to only a half dozen photographers in all of Shanghai (the consulate actually has a list), with photographer’s official stamp, signature, shop address and date hand written on the back of each photo.

Said photographer needs to check your ID to verify that you are not in fact an impostor. The form was quite adamant about protocol, and my 5 previous passport applications were quite strict about enforcing it.

However, as noted, all shops were closed for the week due to the need to sweep tombs.

The woman behind the plexiglass at the consulate had no suggestions for us, just a bored shrug, but a guy in the waiting room ran after us as we left in frustration, saying that for whatever reason, in Shanghai, metro station photo-booth photos were acceptable.

Off we went to the Jing’an Temple station up the road, where we monopolized the photobooth for a good half hour, trying to find an option in accordance with the Canadian required dimensions. In case you were wondering, it’s a sub-sub option in the visa application section.

My first round of photos clearly show my love for bureaucracy and ease of transaction. Also, my need for anti-static-electricity hair gel. I look like one of those big metal stands science teachers use to teach kids about electricity.  Strands of superfine hair stood up everywhere.

Put your hand here, Billy.

The sorrow of a thousand years of pent up passport pain

Totally not legit passport photos in hand, we returned to the passport office to discover that half of my references were invalid. Apparently Doug is considered by Canada as my common-law spouse (hey Doug, thought you oughta know!) and so couldn’t be used because he’s family. I had to scramble to remember the address of someone else who wasn’t family that I could use. I decided to use Cissy, my lone colleague out at Tongji for my last two years of bleak, lonely teaching. Then I realized that I had no idea what her real name was and had to call her up to say, hey, yeah, I know we worked together for two years and we’ve hung out since but, um, hey, what’s your real name? 

It felt like a dirty one night stand.

As well, on the official application form, it said that you  need a guarantor (doctor, dentist, judge, bank manager, etc) who has known you at least 2 years and can personally vouch for your identity. I’ve been to a dental clinic here (twice, different guys each time, the first of whom is long gone), seen one anonymous doctor (for my last rabies shot), had 3 different bank accounts (but have never once met any of my managers),  and have yet to meet anyone involved in the judiciary process.

The woman at the consulate slid the Form in Lieu of a Guarantor through the slot under the plexiglass window.

What you need when attempting to prove your identity to the Canadian Consulate when you don’t know any lawyers or doctors in Shanghai:

• A detailed list of every job (with address and contact number) you’ve held in the past 5 years (mine had a lot of question marks and gaps)
• A detailed list of every address you’ve lived at in the past 5 years (I had to ask for a second sheet of paper)
• A list of 5 more non-related people who have known you at least 2 years, plus their full address, phone number, email address (you have no idea how hard it is to think of that many on the spot) and their specific relationship to you and exactly how long you’ve known them.

As I slowly filled it out in the tiny, windowless room, brain aching from trying to remember my own life, the woman behind the plexiglass poked her finger through the little slot under the window and told me, like a teacher scolding a student, that I must write on my In Lieu of a Guarantor form the following message:

I, Mary Anne Oxendale, have been officially warned that I must never, ever, ever, ever again attempt to apply for a passport in Shanghai without a guarantor, even if they don’t actually know me as a person and are unable to legitimately vouch for my identity in a credible way.

I was quite certain that a spanking was forthcoming.

Normally a new passport would take three weeks to be issued but my lack of guarantor and dubious personal history meant I’d be waiting a month, at least (‘we’ll let you know if we find any inconsistencies in your stories which would lead to delays‘, she’d said to me, as if resigned to such a fate).

During that month, phone calls were made. My poor, saintly referees (who shall remain anonymous) were grilled over the phone about the following:

• Where do her parents live?
• What’s her street address?
• What colour are her eyes?
• What’s her hair colour?
• What job does she do exactly, and who is her employer?

And so on.

And if you’ve only known me here in Shanghai, as a faux-redhead whose job situation is convoluted and bizarre at best, whose building opens out onto a totally different street from the official street address, then some of these questions might be difficult.

Two referees called me to double check that they had answered things correctly. They had, kinda. And kinda not.

Because my hair isn’t red and I don’t live on Jiashan Lu (even though our driveway opens onto it), my eyes aren’t blue but they can look like it some days, and I don’t really work for those Exam People because my visa is with my other job, and my parents live in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, and not in Vancouver itself, because, well, if you’ve never ever been to Canada, how are you supposed to know these things?

I spent most of April waiting for that call from Canada stating that they’d decided to revoke my citizenship after all.

On Thursday, when Jeannie came over from Wuxi to join me for the official Collection of the Passports, I was actually nervous. About getting a passport. For my own country of birth. A renewal one, at that.

I got it. It was fine. The plexiglass woman even smiled slightly when she slid it over.

So, yeah.

But let me  tell you about one of the two other times when I got my passports abroad!

My first time was in South Africa in 1999 or 2000, but it was uneventful aside from the fact that I got a random Cape Town cop (with a huge gun) to be my guarantor and that I was inexplicably issued with just a 1 year passport (to be extended to 5 when I got back to Canada). That one-year passport caused me no end of grief as it stated quite boldly next to my name: THIS IS A ONE YEAR PASSPORT! VALID UNTIL [one year later]! Only on page 3 was there a tiny little stamp saying, hey, yo, we just added 4 more years!

But anyway, the other one…

Best One Ever in a Weird Kind of Way: Turkey!

This one was an odd one.  It came at the beginning of my second year in Turkey, around mid-2003, when I was living in the wilds of Anatolia. My passport only had about 8 months left on it when I got my new ikamet (the work permit booklet you get there), but I was only granted a 6 month work visa because my passport didn’t have the full year left. It was no big deal though, as my school was well connected and I just had to do a last minute passport renewal after 4 months and everything would be fine. And it was.

A month before I took a day off from work to make the long journey to Ankara to the embassy, I emailed them to ask what I’d need. A dude called Smiley (‘Don’t call me Ismail’) replied.

A month later, I showed up at the embassy’s front door at 9am after an overnight bus ride from Kayseri. At the desk was Smiley (Ismail on the name tag).

I handed over my filled-in forms, including my Guarantor form which had been filled in by my family doctor back home. He had known me far longer than just the 2 year minimum required.

“I’m sorry,” said Smiley, smiling, “but Canada is not within the legal jurisdiction of the Canadian Embassy in Turkey. You need a Guarantor here in Turkey.”

“But I’ve only lived here a year,” I said.

“Well then, I shall be your guarantor. For 20 million lira.” That was about $12 at the time.  Not a bad rate for bribery. I gave him the money and he told me to go halfway down the block to that lovely tea shop over there for some nice cup of tea and some fresh, hot poğaça. He’d call me when he was done.

Now, normally passports take at least 2 weeks to process, under the best of circumstances. Abroad it tends to be more like a month. Even emergency passports take a day or two or three.

I was barely halfway through my tea and bun when Smiley called twenty minutes later. My passport was ready. I could pick it up as soon as I’d eaten my fill of breakfast. I was to take my time. No hurry.

Apparently they’d started all the paperwork when I sent out my initial inquiry. I guess there’s not all that much to do at the Canadian embassy in Ankara. Lots of tea drinking, poğaça eating, perhaps. Gotta keep busy by filling out applications before the applicant has even gotten around to it.

I was back on the noon bus to Kayseri, passport and take-away beyaz peynirli poğaça in hand.

The passport itself was non-machine-readable, as I was probably one of 3 people to ever get her passport renewed in Ankara so they never bothered to upgrade their passport-making-gizmo. This made things incredibly complicated at border crossings for the next five years as every immigration agent tried futilely to get the photo page to scan, when it stated quite plainly amongst the numbers along the bottom: This passport is not machine readable; Ce passeport n’est pas lisible à la machine (or something like that)…

Try telling that to the angry Bulgarian customs agent on the Turkish border.

What Does it Take For a Girl to Get a Passport Around Here? Adventures in Being Canadian Abroad is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

Shanghai's all about aesthetics. Note the pleasing contrast between demolition site and nursery.

Doug said this morning that he really wouldn’t put it past me if I started raising chickens in the flat.  I wondered if the neighbours would notice or care if I beheaded said chickens out in the shared hallway, between the lifts and the parked bicycle.

That awful 3-legged yappy dork-dog from across the hall would probably hover around me, bouncing on its remaining legs, trying to gnaw on my ankles as I wielded the axe, as usual. Not that I usually wield an axe in our shared hallway.

I’d give the little old lady from the 11th floor the feet and neck, because she actually greets me cordially in the lift instead of staring at the ads, silently.

Given that this is Shanghai, I have a sneaking suspicion that it might just be okay to do this. Not legal or anything, but feasible. Our street, after all, is littered with the carcasses and feathers and splattered body juices of various fish and fowl and occasional crustacean. You can’t walk more than 5 metres down the sidewalk without having to step out onto the road to avoid tubs of flopping, panicked fish or wire cages full of resigned ducks with bound feet.

Oh, casual death.

There’s even a chicken tied to a power pole up near the corner of Yongkang lu, which strolls around quite confident that it will avoid the fate of its featheren.

Is that even a word? It should be.

I’ve decided to postpone my foray into raising poultry until we have more than just a smallish flat in central Shanghai without even an outdoor balcony. I do find the idea of urban farming fascinating though, especially when living in a city (and by extension, country) where you never know whether your orange is really orange or just dyed, or if your greens were grown in contaminated fields using, say, radioactive water and tainted fertilizer, or if your egg is really an egg and not some weird glue/plastic amalgam. You never really know what you’re getting yourself into here.

If we had a rooftop terrace, I’d likely delve into raised beds, composting, egg-laying birds of various sorts (duck? chicken? quails?), possibly some interesting shrubberies. Everyone needs shrubberies in their life.

We have nothing of the sort, however, so I’ve resigned myself to keeping our houseplants alive and to experimenting with small, sproutable things. Currently, I’m playing Frankenstein to a micro crop of sacrificial celery bottoms, old garlic, and a rather dire potato that was trying to sprout itself to death in the cupboard.

I started out a few years ago by successfully keeping a few houseplants alive, in spite of the toxic tap water and appalling potting soil they came in. About four months ago, I started using the filtered water from the shower hose, which has some sort of Canadian water purifying attachment that my parents brought over at Christmas. I still haven’t found any decent commercial soils, nor do I have access to worms for composting. I have, however, been adding used tea leaves to the soil, which they seem to like.

For the record, for the Sri Lankans out there, they really like my Nuwara Eliya BOP black tea.

They also seem to like used coffee grounds, which is pleasing as we have plenty of those in this household.

Any leaves that fall, I let decompose naturally in the pot. This also seems to please them.

This one shivered in my unheated office out at Tongji for 2 years before I brought it home. It has since doubled in height.

This one keeps reaching its sticky-fingered tentacles out to latch onto the sink fixtures and wreak havoc on our plumbing.

More recently, I found myself experimenting with sprouting. Not the proper, nutritionally dense alfalfa sprouts or even bean sprouts of my childhood. I wrote about those a few years ago on one of my long-since-abandoned WP.com blogs.

These sprouts are bigger, badder, bolder, weirder.

I’m sprouting the following, just to see what they’ll do: celery (Chinese, from the street vendor), garlic, one potato.

Basically, I’ve become the Frankenstein of the vegetable kingdom.

Below is my first experiment, which you may be aware of if you’ve been following my Great Celery Experiment updates on Twitter and Facebook. I took the last three tired pieces of celery and lopped off their bottoms, about two inches from the root of the stalks. I then planted said bottom stumps in a planter that housed the last remaining stem of a plant that was killed by Doug’s office. I’m trying to revive it. We shall see if it’s possible.

The death of most of that plant allowed for a lot of space to plant my celery bottoms. I gave them new layers of soft pillowy tea leaves every few days and watered them every morning with filtered shower water.  To my surprise, they pretty much immediately started to grow, poking out fresh little leaves from within. Below you can see them at their one week anniversary, which was last night.

Have you met my minions?

In addition to the rather enthusiastic celery, I added 3 cloves of garlic that had started sprouting in the drawer. I poked them down into the soil, green sprout facing up (the pointy end, if your clove hasn’t sprouted yet– I later tried out a fresh clove and it started to happily grow itself a green pointy top after a day in the soil).  From what I can gather, I will end up with two possible results: a new head of garlic or some rather tasty garlic shoots which are, I can attest, delicious when sauteed with Hunan bacon.

The other experiment, which I don’t have so much confidence in, is my potato. It was pretty sad looking, all sprouty and starting to shrivel in the cupboard. I buried it in the empty soil surrounding the tree that died not long after we bought it a few years ago. We’ve been using the stumps as a Christmas tree/general ornament holder.  It likely died because the soil feels like a blend of sand and depleted dirt. It probably is sand and depleted dirt.

I am slowly feeding it tea leaves, coffee grounds, filtered water and biodegrading fallen plant leaves. It seems to have some rather keen unexpected grass-like long, thin leaves growing, which is quite heartening, even though they’re technically weeds. At least this indicates that the soil isn’t 100% dead.

Also in the potato pot, I planted that lone unsprouted clove of garlic. I hope it isn’t too lonely.

Gerald the Bear is technically responsible for the care and maintenance of The Potato

Up next, I intend to attempt to grow spring onions from just their bottom white bits. I’ve heard you can do the same with fresh basil too, as long as the root area is still attached.

We shall see.

EDIT [28 April 2012]: Look what we brought home today!

Have you met our new herbs? The kitchen smells awesome.

Gardening in Shanghai and Other Indoor Sports is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

Where to begin?

One thing I have learned from two years of writing here (and from approximately 30 years of writing in general) is that I can be factual, accurate and interesting- but never all three at the same time.

Most of my university career was spent writing wildly ‘factual’ papers that my professors deemed interesting enough to merit a steady stream of As, but which had the added caveat of being, typically, disturbingly inaccurate. As one prof noted on a paper about the spread of Islam in the 7th century as compared with that in contemporary times, my piece was very well argued, remarkably convincing, but fundamentally wrong.  I’m not even sure I did research for that paper.

My research methodology at that time typically boiled down to something along the lines of, ‘I have no idea what really happened but I’ll start writing (at midnight, before the deadline) and hopefully a point will come to me eventually’.  If I did any research, it was typically done as I wrote, hence my ability to type 45 wpm with just my left hand whilst holding source material in my right hand. Sometimes this grasping-at-straws approach worked fabulously. Sometimes it failed in a rather big way.  On a paper about Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, my first year lit professor scrawled, ‘bold and original yet thoroughly incomprehensible’.

As noted in my piece on memory, a goodly proportion of my emails and blog posts over the past 17 or so years have all contained one or two grains of truth amongst the glitter of hyperbole and the balm of omission. Things I write may or may not be true, and the things that are true may not have happened exactly as described. Anything that is particularly interesting is probably only half true.

Which is a bit of a problem when you’ve been hired to write a series of Shanghai walking tours for a very professional European smart phone city guide app company.

They commissioned me to do this back in, um, October or so. I’m still working on the second, out of three total. The process has proved to be much harder on my brain than expected for a number of reasons. Trying to create something that is detailed and accurate and interesting is proving to be my albatross. Or my white whale. Or my giant tuna. One of those metaphors has to be the right one.

Shanghai isn’t an easily mappable city.

Seriously. Especially the fiddly old town bits over by the Yu Gardens. I dare you to find a detailed map that is accurate enough to lead someone step by step with just their smart phone and your soothing voice-over for directions. Remember, you can’t just tell them to go wander off and explore the area, taking in the sights and sounds and smells and blah blah blah. They are like toddlers; you must lead them by the hand. You mustn’t let them get lost. Every metre, every turn counts.

Good luck following these directions (seriously, they don't actually point toward anything)

Whole blocks in this city are demolished without warning; key lanes and entryways are blocked off with construction; scaffolding obscures signs and street numbers (if they are even numbered, which they frequently aren’t); lanes and paths that are marked may not be marked in English or pinyin or the names may have changed in the year since the map was printed; small but pivotal lanes that are marked on a map are frequently unnamed, as are the cross streets.

I dare you to find your way around using this map sent to me by the Shanghai Tourism Board (apologies for Photo Booth mirror image and for chipped nail polish)

I’ve ordered maps from tourism boards that left me even more lost and confused than before I attempted to orient myself using their directions. The Lonely Planet Shanghai map of the old town is nice and clear… until you hit the part that really needs detailed instructions if you intend to follow a very specific route, which is when it devolves into a jumbled mess of numbers and arrows pinpointing a dozen sites, all clustered so tightly together that there is no longer any room for stuff like, say, roads and lanes and whatnot.

I’ve spent over a month now trying to write a coherent tour of the old town area, starting up at East Nanjing road, heading down the Bund and cutting across to Yu Gardens. Should I also note that all the maps I’ve got completely omit the fact that the Bund was totally overhauled two years ago and that their entry and exit points are generally all wrong?

If left up to me and my brain that struggles to accept the concept of facts or accuracy existing concurrently, I’d just leave vague instructions for the walker to head roughly in the direction of, say, that fake city wall in the park near the bottom of the Bund, then go off and explore by themselves within, say, the delineated parameters of X, Y, and Z streets (so they don’t wander off and find themselves in Suzhou or something). Instead, I need exact intersections, GPS coordinates, precise distance covered, turns made, navigational landmarks, and a series of specific sights that must be seen.

Which leads me to the other difficulty.

I have no clue what is interesting to others

I mean, seriously- I blog about mops as a hobby. In Istanbul, most of my photos were of cats and tea cups. In Myanmar, I was fixated on trying to take pictures of doorways and biryanis. Thailand was a series of power lines and electrical transformers, Thai beige-themed hair dyes, mops and brooms, and signs that I deemed hilarious.

Is this interesting? I included it in the tour. I hope it's interesting. It's an old pharmacy that's super-touristy now.

I feel utterly presumptuous compiling lists of supposed points of interest, as if what I think is interesting would also be interesting to others. When I comb tourist websites for objectively worthwhile sights to include, I find my brow wrinkling and the gears in my brain making horrible grinding noises. However, I can’t just tell the hypothetical tourist that I’m leading to go have a look at that weird papier mâché’d bicycle leaning against that soon-to-be-demolished wall. For one, I’m sure they really aren’t interested. For two, the wall and bike will probably be gone by tomorrow. For three, how can I write 500 characters (not including spaces) about something so ephemeral and impressionistic?

Thus, I stick to points that are already established points of interest, with a history and important dates, with things to look for architecturally, with accompanying trivia. By doing this, I have facts and accuracy but I feel my writing suffers for it. It feels heavy. It doesn’t feel like something I wrote. It’s someone else’s voice.

I’m easily discouraged/distracted when I attempt to construct something linear

My first attempt at walking my hypothetical tour of the Yu Gardens area was a bit of a disaster. I couldn’t even find half of the points I’d written down in my list. The massive crowds in the faux nouveau-bazaar area made me want to jump out of my skin and the circling touts made me want to punch the next person to approach me. I ended up cowering for a while behind some lion statues, consoling myself with fried dumplings found in the temporary street food fair that was obscuring most of the sights, signs and lanes that I was trying to map.

Almost as effective as valium

After circumnavigating the entire Yu bazaar complex a dozen times and feeling increasingly confused and overwhelmed and no closer to a solid clear path that could be followed than I had before I’d even started, I crossed out a half dozen sights on my list and contemplated re-training as, say, a carpenter or noodle maker. I was obviously not cut out to be a writer of anything that involved research or reality.

With my much-modified new version of the Yu end of the tour roughly mapped out, I decided to tackle the much more linear Bund end of things. I took pictures of all the important old colonial era buildings but forgot to note their names and addresses. I now have a day’s worth of work that can’t be used until I head back out there and try to figure out which building is which. Several of the buildings that I included on my tour (and diligently photographed) turned out to not be relevant enough to merit even a Wikipedia entry, much less a footnote in a respectable historical tour of the city. No 500 character summaries there. My list of sights was growing ever shorter.

Up at the East Nanjing road end of things, with the end in sight, I dodged the Hello-Watch-Bag-Hello touts and tried to figure out what, if anything, was actually interesting there. I kind of loathe that end of town. It’s crowded, invasive, full of chain stores and pick pockets. I chose a series of specialty shops that purportedly dated back to [insert dynasty here] and sold [insert hyperbolic adjective here] foods, clocks, traditional medicines, calligraphy brushes.

The research I had done on them was frequently contradictory, with dates and details shifting subtly between the various sources. Some of the  Chinese sources praised [insert very famous shop name here] for achievements that had obviously been run through the Google Translator and made no sense at all (case in point, what exactly is ‘glue of tortoise plastron’ and why is it so important that people from all over China come here for it? And why would people seek out home made donkey skin?)

I ended up returning home with more question marks on my check list than definitive answers.

How do I tell someone how to get from here to there? Seriously.

I’m trying to figure out whether my brain-aching struggle to plot out my series of tours is my own fault (most likely, really) or if Shanghai is just a really hard city to pin down.  It feels like a moving target sometimes. This is a city that keeps re-mapping its present and rewriting its past. Maybe I’d be better off just making the whole thing up. It would probably turn out to be just as accurate and most definitely more interesting.

Mapping the Amorphous City: I Attempt to Plot a Walking Tour of Shanghai is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

One of the crappy things about living abroad is that your friends tend to leave.  I now have one less person to have coffee with here (sad face!), but this move has done Amber a world of good. She got back into her writing in a serious way: she wrote a book. A whole, freaking book. Which you’re going to read, because she’s an amazing, beautiful writer.

Here’s the deal: I’ll send you a free ebook copy of her book if you promise to write a review for it on Amazon. Free. She has worked her butt off to write something powerful, to polish it into something professional, and to throw it out there bravely into the big world as an author. I think that’s pretty awesome.

If you want a free review copy of the novel, leave a comment below and I’ll email it to you.

This is her book

Without further ado, here is quite possibly the only guest post I’ve ever published (interviews don’t count): Amber Roshay talking about what it’s like to go home again.  Her new blog can be found here and details about her books (yes, she has more than one) are here.

In teacher mode, in Shanghai

Thoughts from Over Here – The Return

Coincidentally on the plane returning to the United States the passenger next to me was reading Bill Bryson’s nonfiction short story collection, I’m a Stranger Here Myself. I had never read the book but the title resonated with me because I was, like him, returning to my home country after five years away. Every time I left the States, I always exited with the impression that I didn’t belong; or quite possibly never had, otherwise why would I have left in the first place?

Not quite the US, no (pic by MaryAnne)

My exodus wasn’t planned like I wanted it to be. I wasn’t returning with a treasure trove of money or back to a fabulous job; I was returning because I needed to. A long time ago I read a book about how individuals create footprints that lead back to where they were born. This idea of an invisible line, leading me home, brings reassurance to an altogether hazy future.

Below me, under the seat in a carrier, was my 7 month year old black and white tuxedo cat named Oreo. We adopted her from a non-profit organization that saves abandoned animals. She came to us covered in fleas and not weighing more than a can of soda. I tell friends she’s the only thing I brought home from China. Although, this is not true. I came home as a scared doppelganger. I had no idea who I would be or if I would be able to give up the expat life in favor of a normal existence. Once again I faced a new beginning. As Oreo scratched incessantly against the cotton mesh opening, her cries drowned out by the engine, I decided I needed to make positive changes in my life. The return home meant finally being brave enough to stop hiding. Travel for me had turned into a way to avoid being proactive in my life.

Almost rose coloured glasses (technically sunglasses...Pic by MaryAnne)

A traveler is concerned with the most basic elements: securing a place to sleep for the night, arranging a bus ticket, finding an Internet café. The experience of a new place is the primary goal. I’m always obsessed with new places. I became fixated with Prague in the early 2000’s, after visiting for a writer’s conference and becoming fascinated with the cobblestone streets and ornate fixtures. Prague became the setting for my first novel and is very much a main character in the story. My second novel is based in Thailand where I lived for a year as a teacher. I write about these places in order to understand them and to give them true meaning.

Shanghai has its moments (pic by MaryAnne)

This changed when I moved to Shanghai. My writing stopped. At first I was scared of being watched by the government. This was paranoia, although there is some truth to this delusion. In China, you learn to avoid the hotspots. Shanghai also overwhelmed me. I went from living in a small village to cohabiting with 22 million strangers. Once the claustrophobia wore off, I convinced myself that I was on perpetual vacation.

In some ways, living abroad stunts your growth. Expats never grow up because no one requires them to evolve. Chinese people allow foreigners in, but don’t necessarily take the time to truly get to know them. So they tend to make friends with other foreigners, who don’t have children and remain frozen. Society does not put pressure on them to conform because they’re not a part of the mainstream culture. Personal connections and family members are thousands of miles away and so are the expectations. Self-improvement, exercising and eating healthily are harder because existence is about enduring day to day, not what the future may bring. Sustaining in this frame of mind can be magical and it can also be dilapidating. It’s easy to forget about whom you truly are when you’re never confronted with who you were supposed to be.

Different from, say, California (pic by MaryAnne)

Some days, living in Shanghai was like living in a snow globe or a bell jar. Everyone around me planned their escape. Friendships rarely became long term. The longer you remain, the less willing you are to commit to a new friend, when you know they will be gone soon. For those who do stay indefinitely, they usually marry a Chinese girl or are incapable of assimilating to life back home. These lifers are not travelers, but rather ship wreck survivors on a secret island.

Memories of this can be jarring (pic by MaryAnne)

This is not to say that living in Shanghai did not give me more than it took. I spent four years there, navigating the subway, teaching the new generation, and learning to understand and navigate Chinese culture. The experience taught me patience, perseverance and acceptance. In many ways surviving in Shanghai is much easier than making it back home. I could afford the best restaurants, three week holidays twice a year, and a weekly maid. But, in the end these benefits lost their luster. The footprints led me back home.

Perhaps, I followed them too early. I returned to a country with over 10% unemployment, a struggling economy and facing multiple social problems.  Only time will tell. I find that I am now fascinated with Shanghai, much like my obsession for Prague years ago. I expect I will need to write about ‘my Shanghai,’ in order to understand my experience and give my readers a true sense of being a part of a Chinese city while being completely separate at the same time.

I will have to give a snapshot of the bell jar.

Amber Roshay Moved Back to the US and Wrote About it (And Also Wrote a Book That We’re Giving Away Here) is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

What I can do, however, is to use my extensive experience and critical eye to give you a better idea of what to expect when you are shipped off to a 2nd or 3rd tier city in China and put up in what is usually a 5 star hotel.

Today, we will start with the charming Oakwood Residence in Hangzhou, conveniently located absolutely nowhere near anything of touristic or culinary interest, in a business district with an acute shortage of taxis and a surplus of active construction sites. As my parents can attest from their painfully hypothermic 3 night visit back in December, the lake is an hour’s walk away, along a busy 6 lane artery devoid of anything that might be construed as ‘scenic’.

The hotel is, however, part of the shiny new Euro-American Centre, which is a plaza of sorts catering to the needs of visiting business folk who really need Starbucks, fake Japanese ramen, and outrageously expensive bottles of wine.  I mean, who needs the beauty of one of the most scenic cities in China when you can get a latte and a bowl of udon without having to walk more than a few steps?

Hey, look, it's the Lake!

Getting there

To get to the Oakwood Residence, you have two choices: public bus (the B2, found upstairs at the train station, about 3rmb, not recommended if you have luggage as it is a Chinese bus- I mean, there are 8.7 million registered residents in this quaint, tiny city, and only about 3 or 4 taxis to be shared by all. Things can get crowded. Exit at Jiaogong lu stop, after about 30-40 minutes in traffic, half a block past the hotel) or taxi (about 20rmb).

Inexplicably, their own website gives printable pdf directions entirely in English (including the map), which, as all foreigners in China surely know by now, will be totally useful in a taxi. Because all taxi drivers are fluent and literate in English. Not.

I probably should have opted for the bus this time, as the taxi queue was absurd.  It was the weekend leading up to the Grave Sweeping festival and everyone and his dog urgently needed to take a taxi from the railway station to, I presume, the local cemetery for a little ancestor dusting. Touts were out in full force and, to be honest, I probably would have hired one of the remarkably comfortable mafia-themed black taxis if I hadn’t needed the official stamped fapiao to claim my expenses.

The queue to get a taxi at Hangzhou railway station.

Look closely at the driver's licence. It expired a week ago.

The Hotel

I have a very thorough knowledge of the world’s hotels, as I spent most of my 20s living in grungy, overcrowded hostels (which are technically hotels, but modestly reverting back to the retro S rather than using the accent circonflexe on the O in hôtel) and most of my 30s in slightly better $20 Cambodian guest houses and small Burmese non-government hotels that provide private rooms with en suite bathrooms, towels and gratis police registration.

This makes me eminently qualified to review 5 star hotels.

The Oakwood, below, is actually two buildings, the North and South Towers. I think one is smoking and the other is non. I’ve stayed in both and they’re pretty much identical. The pool is in the South Tower. They have a lovely pool, which I had time to visit just once (when I had a 4 day session back in January and so didn’t just spend all my waking hours in a small windowless room in a very tall office block ten minutes away by foot) and a gym, which I’ve never even attempted to see.

A small step up from the Three Ducks Hostel in Paris.

You can almost see a verdant hill in the far distance. Good luck getting a taxi.

There’s a huge buffet restaurant where you get a free breakfast on the 4th floor of the North Tower. The coffee is decent. In the past, I tended to go a bit crazy on the food, as I’m not normally a breakfast person and couldn’t decide whether I wanted a standard Chinese, British, American, Japanese or Korean breakfast, so I sampled a bit of each and had to take much of it away in a covert ziploc doggie-bag for lunch. I recommend the build-your-own soups (see bowl below).

Time to mix your breakfast metaphors!

Every floor looks pretty much the same.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

The Room

This visit, I was given a slightly smaller than usual room in the North Tower, as all the bigger and better rooms were being used by actual paying guests staying there for the Tomb Sweeping festival. Unfortunately, in spite of my pitiful pleading, my room did not have a bath tub. The rooms with bath tubs are magnificent, if only because, well, the bath tubs are awesome. They even have a big bowl of bath salts to use. The tubs are built to comfortably allow both booze and snacks to sit solidly on their perimeter, allowing for a very nice bathing experience. This room did have, however, a rather decent chaise longue, complimentary apples and a copy of the Shanghai Daily.

But can it stand up to a comparison with the Flying Pig Hostel in Amsterdam?

The full-wall window had a delightful view overlooking the unique Hangzhou scenery

My heart ached to discover I didn't get a room with bath tub this time

Unlike the Sofitel Zhengzhou, these are not by L'Occitane! Where's my verbena?

The Oakwood is technically an apartment-hotel configuration, so there’s a full sized fridge, kitchenette with a little stove and kettle, a washing machine that apparently washes your clothes with hot water (a miracle!), ironing board, and a bunch of other wonders I never use.  I think there was even an umbrella in the closet. No gas masks though. I always like finding gas masks in Chinese hotel closets.  They did, however, have some lovely Twinings English Breakfast and Earl Grey teabags and bottled water (the dodgy Nongfu Springs stuff, but still).

No minibar so you have to stock the full sized fridge yourself

I had to supply my own chips.

World's largest ashtray, so you can smoke yourself to death as you read the True Stories in the Shanghai Daily and eat your lovely apples

Oh, and they have room service!

Dinner options!

Fancy eating something cruel?

Have a craving for sea cucumber?

Something for him? For her?

The Surrounding Neighbourhood

I work about ten minutes away, just up the street, so my path is a limited but well-trod one. As you can see, the scenic attractions aren’t as compelling as the lovely West Lake or the tea plantations or the various temples scattered in the woods near the lake, but still- this, dear people, is a perfect nouveau-Chinese skyline!

Ah, the delicate, natural beauty of Hangzhou!

The area has many fine dining establishments close at hand! Immediately within the Euro-American Centre where the Oakwood is located, there is an Ajisen Ramen (part of the chain), a surreal curry place that has purported French and Portuguese curries on the menu, as well as the Malay and Indian ones, a Starbucks (don’t eat the sandwiches! They have been re-interpreted for local tastes…unsuccessfully) and, across the busy road, a KFC.

My rather tasty spicy beef fried rice at the Ajisen faux Japanese Ramen joint

If you cross the street and go straight ahead past the bright yellow electronics mega-mart, you’ll find a stretch of tiny restaurants, all local. I’ve tried a few with varying levels of success.

Gourmet local cuisine in the surrounding neighbourhood

This is what I got yesterday for lunch from the place on the left, next door to Gorgeous.

Not bad for 21 kuai.

 The Oakwood Residence is located at No 28 Jiaogong Road, Hangzhou,  Zhejiang

Disclaimer: The opinions stated here are entirely my own and Oakwood has no idea I even exist. Maybe if they see this I’ll get a room with a bath tub next time. Hint hint. 

2nd Tier City, 1st Class Hotel: A Totally Impractical Review of Hangzhou Oakwood Residence is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

What is this colour I see in the skies before me?

We are now, improbably for March in Shanghai, on Day 5 in a wild streak of completely sunny, bright, warm days. Yesterday I went out in a light cotton Thai sun dress with a medium weight cardigan over my shoulders, not convinced that I could shed so many layers before the month was out. I could and I did before long. I felt almost chipper, what with the sun beating down and the few remaining birds in the city attempting a song.

I’d have skipped along Huaihai lu if all passersby wouldn’t have stopped to stare and point and mutter. A significant proportion of people around me were still bundled up in dark, thick winter coats, as if the warmth wasn’t enough to convince them that this was an irregular March.

When we first moved to Shanghai in February of 2009, I remember distinctly the 20-odd days of non-stop rain that darkened the skies and saturated everything for most of March. I had wet laundry draped over every surface in my flat for nearly a month. The laundry took ages to dry because the air both inside and outside was so chillingly damp, and the laundry was indoors, draped over my kitchen chairs and water dispenser, because my old-skool flat at that time only had a bamboo pole drying rack jutting out from the bedroom window. 21 days of rain meant 21 days of wet laundry.

Our neighbours like airing their dirty laundry at the slightest hint of sunshine

Winters in this city can be exhausting and depressing. Because we are south of the Yangtze river, buildings aren’t usually heated and flats are not insulated. It isn’t cold like Harbin or Dalian, but it feels colder because you never get warm. It’s a bone-aching wet cold. The skies are grey and heavy for weeks on end and the smog settles down and adds layers of thick, white invisibility to the city.

Some mornings, I parted our living room curtains and looked out over the city from an uninterrupted view, 16 floors up, and saw nothing. Zero visibility. Zero visibility mixed with draughts of cold, wet air puffing in through the poorly fitted single-pane windows. If you stop to look carefully at our wall-to-wall living room windows, you might notice the .5 cm cracks and gaps between the panes. This accounts for  numb toes in the flat and painful heating bills.

At one point when my parents were visiting, we stuffed the cracks and crevices with a cut up old sweater of mine and lined with panes with multi hued electricians’ tape, which then proceeded to slowly unstick and fall limply from the frame, like sad red, blue, yellow and green linguine.

I believe the Brothers Grimm named themselves after how they felt during winter in Shanghai

In winter and early spring, I find it hard to leave the flat. We keep the curtains closed (nothing to see here, move along) and stay inside, drinking coffee, reading, baking. Not much point in going out. I mean, you can’t even see the outside outside. Why would you want to go out there?

It’s a terrible state of mind to be in when you’re intentionally living abroad. I read too many travel blogs and am wracked with guilt for really not giving a toss about exploring my local area and having meaningful interactions with local people during these months.

My super secret job involves being shipped out to 2nd and 3rd tier cities around China to interview 30 or so people at a time, so when I’m not out there working during the grimmer months, I retreat.  My latent melancholia bubbles up and I get cranky and sad and start frequently questioning my life choices. My writer’s block becomes suffocating and I can remedy it only by writing about cooking (it’s impersonal enough and methodical enough to be not overwhelming). Such is winter in this city – and by extension, most of March.

Even the mops and caged bunnies look more chipper in bright sunlight

However, as noted above, this week is different, at least for now. Five whole days of loveliness! I’ve gone for walks every day, thoroughly enjoying the light and the air and the warmth. If there were birds or green grass or flowers anywhere, I’d enjoy those too. I haven’t thought about running away in desperation to Oaxaca or Fez or Zanzibar once since the sun came out. Sure, I’ve thought about running away to those places, but that escapism came from a somewhat happier place this time.

We’ll see how long this can hold out. If not for my sanity, then at least for the cat’s sanity.

How well do you hold up in winter?

The cat asked me to go buy her a pretty satin parasol to shade her during nap time

Sunshine and Lollipops in Shanghai: I Do Believe It Is Springtime! is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

There should be a welcome mat here somewhere

In the past few decades, I’ve lived in approximately 8 cities in 6 countries on four continents. That tally doesn’t include the hundreds of hostels, sofas and floors I called home for most of my early 20s. In the past decade alone- my more settled, grown-up 30s- I’ve lived in 3 cities in two countries and have averaged a new flat every year.  Since moving to Shanghai back in February of 2009, I’ve already called three flats home. By June, that number will be bumped up to four, as our landlord is selling our flat as soon as our lease is up.

It’s a bit tiring.

If you were to look at my hypothetical apartment rental score sheet, you might think I was a fickle flake with no sense of permanence, no desire to be settled. A nomad who is still saving up for her first herd of yaks, who is still on the lookout for the perfect ger (hey, Mountain Equipment Co-op, I’m looking at you here!).

In your mind, you possibly imagine me surrounded by unopened boxes, still packed from the previous move. Hell, you probably think I have no boxes at all. Maybe a 20 liter backpack with three changes of underwear and a ballpoint pen. Scratch that- I have, at most, a hobo handkerchief satchel tied to the end of a rough stick.

Yeah, no.

I have come to realize over the course of my rather geographically unstable adulthood that, in spite of my rather ambitious travel CV, I am horribly, irreconcilably domesticated. My very core practically screams for a kitchen, a garden, a plump and furry cat and a fireplace with a cup of hot tea. I came out of the metaphorical closet on that one back in September with my other blog, which practically rolls around in the kitchen with a degree of glee matched only by a dog rolling in dead salmon by the river’s edge. If you are unfamiliar with such an occasion, trust me: dead salmon + dog + rolling around = bliss.

I currently own a wok, a smallish counter top oven, a rice cooker and a sturdy, clay-lined crock pot. I have houseplants that are still alive. I own a vacuum cleaner (a hand me down from a more stable expat friend, but still). I have two pairs of slippers (winter and summer editions), two full sets of bedding, and a closet full of clothes that will never be able to be compressed into a backpack.

Don’t even ask me about the number of shoes I currently own. Or, for that matter, about the heart breaking number of magnificent shoes I’ve had to abandon all over the world over the years.

My favourite hand-made Turkish shoes, lost in one move or another, circa 2005

I have also come to realize that, for whatever reason, my two biggest compulsions- impulsive, minimally-baggaged travel and emphatic domestic hermitude- effectively cancel each other out. If I indulge in one by, say, travelling around Myanmar or Cambodia or wherever for a month or two, my brain is preoccupied by conflicting impulses: Yay travel! Yay adventure! Boo instability! I miss my kitchen! Wahoo! I’m in Yangon! Waaah- I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything! Hey, wow, new places! I totally want to stay here forever! No, wait- I want to leave now!

And so on.

Ever since I stopped working at my full time job last June, I’ve found myself retreating more deeply into quiet domesticity. I don’t want to go out. I want to stay in, I want to cook, I want to bake cookies, I want to read and drink tea and be quiet. Shanghai (and by extension, all of China) is out there, all big and sprawling and noisy and overwhelming, but I don’t really want to engage with it. I don’t want to talk to people. I travel a lot for work- short stints around the country, staying in fancy hotels I wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, taking taxis that I don’t have to pay for, spending the 36 or so hours that I’m there either in my hotel, in a taxi or locked in a small interview room with a stream of 30 or so kids filing in, one by one.

Parts of me are embarrassed by my retreat into solitude. After all, I live in China. I should be out exploring, tasting the delicacies, talking to the locals, etc, etc. Thousands of people sitting in their work cubicles back home, secretly perusing travel and lifestyle redesign websites, are collectively wrinkling their brows in scorn, dismayed that someone who has been given so many opportunities to do interesting things– adventurous things– just wants to drink tea at home, wrapped up in a warm duvet with a book.

And I suppose I do those interesting things to a certain degree- after all, my job kind of has me talking to locals all the time, for hours on end, and many of my meals and journeys are in unfamiliar territory. It’s just that when it’s your entire life (and has been for nearly two decades), sometimes a boring little routine starts to look tempting.

Back in the mid-2000s, when I had just moved to Istanbul from the wilds of Anatolia and had finally found my first unshared apartment at age 30, I used to sit at my living room table, looking out at the neighbours’ garden,  making lists of what I wanted to do with my home, if and when I found somewhere more permanent. Every flat (or room or bed) that I’d had until then had been extremely temporary, with flatmates, room mates, other people’s furniture, other people’s books and art, other people’s leases, other people’s rules. I wanted a place I could stay as long as I wanted, where I could choose the furniture I loved and paint the walls how I pleased. I contemplated how I would fill my spice rack. I carefully filled my hypothetical bookshelf.

I used to sit at my window and make lists of what I would have in my home, if I had one for more than a year.

In spite of my deep seated craving for permanence, I left every flat I’d rented after a year, or sometimes less. I went through 4 flats in four years in Istanbul. Each was lovely (and flawed) in their own way but each needed to be left, for one reason or another: restlessness, a need for a change of scenery, a new job, poor impulse control, frustration. Cracked walls, dreadful plumbing, bitchy neighbours, freezing and unheatable winters, pervy landlords, impossible rent increases. Everything had to change with great regularity.

I still craved a core of stability but at the same time I continued to dismantle the scaffolding. Sometimes I’m quite certain I am my own worst enemy.

Anyway.

We have to be out in the next month or two so I will be flat hunting again. I woke up this morning having temporarily forgotten through my sleep foggy brain that everything would be in a state of upheaval soon enough. It was a bit like waking up after a terrible break up or after a brutal fight with a good friend that changes everything, when it suddenly dawns on you that everything is permanently altered in a small but crucial way. That chunks of your foundation have been chipped away at- again.

It’s just a flat and there are thousands more out there. I’m not afraid of change. I’ve done it a thousand times before and am constantly adapting every day anyway. I had just hoped that some things would remain constant for just a while longer, until I was actually  ready to let them go.

Maybe the next flat won’t have cracked walls or draughty windows or a shower that takes 10 minutes to get hot water. I’m crossing my fingers.

One of my Shanghai neighbours, up the road.

Confessions of a Fauxmad: Notes on Really, Really Wanting a Home is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

Instead, I’ve been doing a ton of cooking, so Wok With Me, Baby is buzzing with new additions, perky and keen with excitement over so much experimentation. Fancy some fresh cheese?  Toaster oven focaccia?  Non-gross sauerkraut?  Go where my current ADD has taken me— but first, read this interview.

Amidst March’s appallingly grey grimness I wanted to bring you someone who presents a much brighter vibe, someone whose expattery is still lovely, fresh and keen. I think my 17+ years of awayness makes it hard for me to appreciate what I’ve got so it’s good to hear from someone who has been to where you are and took away overwhelmingly positive memories.

Also, she’s currently living in Paris, which is making my travel tastebuds drool with envy.

Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you the lovely and talented Edna Zhou, of Expat Edna fame.

Ladies and gents, I bring you Edna Zhou

Leaving

Hello Dalian!

I have been living in Paris for almost two months now.  I moved here after 15 months in Singapore, and prior to that I’d spent a year and a half in China (Dalian and Shanghai). I came here because I love living abroad, but also because I’m chasing a career in international sports media (think Olympics, World Cup, etc). I was told by some contacts in the field that I’d have a much stronger chance if I knew French, as the IOC (International Olympic Committee) is based in Switzerland and operates bilingually (if you’ve ever watched an Olympics you’ve probably noticed everything is in both French and English). So I figured, I’m young enough, I’m dedicated to this field, hell I’ll just move to France and learn French.

I’d previously been traveling for a while, from my Singapore base. I first moved to Singapore after graduation on a whim, and ended up finding a job as the ‘digital strategist’ for a reality tv show. It was run by an extremely small Singaporean production studio, which was definitely interesting, and a good learning experience, but ultimately I quit after nine months (even though they offered me a proper work visa and an extended contract) because I hated how superficial my job was.  For the next six months, I stayed in Singapore and lived off my savings (and some support from my wonderful boyfriend) and traveled around Southeast Asia.

I’d lived abroad before, I first moved overseas at 18 as a student in Dalian, China. It was only meant to be for a semester but after only two or three weeks I was so in love with being abroad that I extended my stay to a year (leading to a nasty argument with my home university and I ended up having to withdraw for the semester!)

I’ve never found the transition to be difficult when I move countries. I think it’s because I never quite felt like I fit in at home in the States, yet whenever I’m abroad I become incredibly confident, social, and outgoing. I don’t miss my family because we were never close growing up. I was quite independent and emotionally closed-off growing up, which I think is why I don’t depend on them for emotional support, because I never have. So even though my family and I are much closer now, I very rarely ever feel homesick. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been homesick in over three years of living abroad.

Singapore New Year Lanterns

I love the feeling of moving to a new place – in fact, prior to Singapore I’d had a very short attention span, and couldn’t stand the thought of living somewhere for more than six months. I’d only planned on staying in Singapore for four months, but now I’m glad I stayed as long as I did – it’s made me see the advantages to living somewhere for a longer period of time and becoming more ‘settled’. I also don’t struggle with meeting people, as the internet makes it so easy to make friends in a new city – the first thing I do when I move is check 1. Twitter. 2. the expat forums and 3. if there is a local gaelic football team. Between the three of those, I usually end up with friends to start with (and then they introduce me to their friends, and my social circle starts to expand more organically from there).  In fact, I’d say of my best friends that I’ve met abroad, the majority of them I originally met online.

The only struggle I have in living abroad is when I know I have to leave a good place. I don’t like to get too comfortable, so I force myself to leave, but it’s obviously not easy. Life in Shanghai was good, but I left because I didn’t want to get stuck in the “China bubble”. Life in Singapore was possibly even better, and I left because I could see myself already falling into the “Singapore bubble”.

There are lots of little unexpected joys about living abroad – although I suppose it’s the expected unexpected I enjoy. I love getting to know my local neighborhood, I love when the fruit juice man recognizes me and my “usual”. Whenever you move you know there will be holidays you don’t know about, new foods to try, unusual experiences to have – and I look forward to finding those ‘unexpected’ joys of living abroad.

There is one unexpected joy though that really was unexpected – I met my boyfriend in Singapore, after we moved into the same flat together. When I left the US after graduation to start my life abroad, I thought having a relationship while traveling was a silly thing to do, so I didn’t date at all (and wasn’t even looking). But then I met Mike… we’ve been together for over a year now.

Staying

Paris!

I’ve been in Paris for two months, and I’ve signed a 12-month contract so I’ll be here for at least ten months more – but I can already tell I’d like to stay longer. There is so much to explore in Paris that I know a year won’t be enough; also, my French isn’t progressing as quickly as I’d like so I will definitely need more than a year of study to become fluent.

My move here was both a choice I actively made, and one that was decided for me. When I decided that I wanted to learn French, I actively made the decision to leave Singapore, and started searching for jobs in France, Switzerland, Belgium – any Francophone country. However, my job found me, and it happened to be located in Paris — so in that respect it was decided for me (although I only had two weeks to get the visa, and the fact that we pulled it off, despite the bureaucratic French red tape involved, was nothing short of a miracle — so I took that as a sign that I was meant to go to Paris!)

When I arrived I didn’t know any French – I would even blank on the word merci. I’ve been taking lessons for four weeks now, and my comprehension is slowly progressing — I love the feeling of accomplishment I get when I can read an advert in the metro or a sign in the supermarket. However my speaking skills are still non-existent. I can get by in a taxi or restaurant, but I wouldn’t even come close to calling it conversational.

I don’t have too much stress about being here, but I’m still only two months in. The one gnawing worry in the back of my mind is, what happens if my contract ends in ten months and it doesn’t get renewed? Will I try to find a job so I can stay in Paris, or should I try to move elsewhere? My problem is that I plan long-term, but I’m not so great at the short-term. When I left Singapore, I had travel plans for the next six weeks, but absolutely nothing lined up after that. I was extremely lucky this job found me when it did, because otherwise I would’ve been stranded jobless in Australia after I finished my six weeks of traveling! So, I have no plans for after Paris yet, which is how I’ve always rolled – but while that was fine when I was younger, I guess now that I’m a little older the uncertainty is starting to scare me a little.

As I mentioned earlier, thanks to the internet (and gaelic football) I don’t find it hard to build up a support network when I move to a new city. But expanding on that, thanks to technology I’m also able to keep my already existing support system around the world. Between the support system I have online to the new friends I make offline, I very, very rarely feel lonely.

My boyfriend is also a fellow expat; but he’s a Brit living in Singapore. We’re currently doing long distance, but just because he isn’t physically here doesn’t mean he didn’t help me adapt to my new life. Again, thanks to technology, I know I have a support system 24/7 – and just having that knowledge, that reassurance that someone is there, really helps in feeling confident about going out and doing whatever it is that I need to do solo, whether it be explore a new city, learn a new language, or play a sport with a new team.

Plus, it helps that he’s still doing the expat thing in Singapore, because it makes me feel like I’m still connected to my life there through him. Like I mentioned earlier, I like to leave places while things are still going well, and that’s hard to do. (I’m one of those sentimental fools who enjoy living in the past and holding onto memories way past their expiration date.) Seeing him hang out with our friends, go to our same favorite snack spots, do the same activities we used to on weekends (like dragon boating), makes me glad at least one of us is still enjoying the Singapore expat life, and makes me feel I haven’t left it all behind.

My feelings about Paris have been slowly developing over the last eight weeks. I’ve never been a Francophile, I was never even that interested in Europe (other than my slightly out-of-control Hibernophilia, but that’s it for the European countries). When I arrived, it didn’t help that it was the dead of winter – the city was freezing and I didn’t want to go out and explore that much. But now that I’ve walked through the city, am starting to understand the language, and the weather’s warmed up, my love for Paris has slowly started to blossom. I can see now why people are obsessed with this country – the food is amazing, the arts are abundant, the culture is rich, the people look good, and well, the city is just beautiful. I’ll never be a Francophile, but I am definitely appreciating more and more what a great opportunity I have to be here, and realizing how good life truly is at the moment. I imagine at the end of the year, if I really do have to leave the city, I will be just as devastated as when I left Singapore and Shanghai.

Maintaining stability

Shanghai!

I know I don’t want to properly “settle down” until I’m in my 30s. I see too many of my friends getting married, having babies, buying houses, advancing the corporate ladder – which is all well and good and I’m happy for them, but when I see that all I can think is, But they don’t get to travel or experience life abroad! and I’m horrified. I couldn’t do that.

However, I’m sure in some way you could argue that I ‘settle down’ by being an expat for a year in this city or that city. I have an apartment, I have a strong social circle, I have “locals” and a metro pass and a bank account and all those other indicators of being settled somewhere.

So it depends on your definition of “settled” and “long-term” – for me, at 22, my life in Paris is settling down a bit. I’d never signed a year-long contract before, and committing to a full 12 months in one place, when before I wouldn’t plan my life more than six months ahead, was a huge step for me. For all the time I spent in China and Singapore, I never once opened a bank account or got a phone plan (meaning I spent 15 months in Singapore paying month-to-month, and without data!) – I think in my mind, those steps meant I’d “settled” and I wasn’t ready to admit I was doing that, because I certainly hadn’t planned on staying in either country so long.

I think whether you want to ‘settle down’ depends on your motivations. In my last two countries, I never quite knew where I was headed (geographically and career-wise), so I stayed on my toes, never unpacked my suitcase, was ready to move to another country on a moment’s notice. Coming to Paris, I have a definite goal in mind, with an enormous payout (chance at my dream career) if I succeed, so I don’t mind ‘sacrificing’ my wanderings for a bank account and a closet full of unpacked clothes.

I think you can pack up and head off as many times as you want in your life, it’s certainly not something that comes with age. I was 18 when I moved abroad the first time, 20 when I graduated university — and by then I already knew I was going to move abroad and not return to the US for at least ten years…if ever.

Everyone’s tastes are different – some people want to backpack round the world, some people just want to have their two-week vacation; some people stay abroad, and others never ever want to leave their little hometown crop circle. I don’t think it’s a matter of age; it’s just a matter of personal preferences. And people’s tastes change, which is why you’ll see people suddenly decide to move abroad after years at home, and vice versa.

Personally, I know moving – and staying – abroad was the best decision I’ve ever made. I never felt quite like I fit in at home in the States, despite being born and raised there. I loved and am grateful for my American upbringing, but I really feel like I come out of my shell, like I’m truly alive and free to be myself, when I’m outside the US.

Of course, there’s your usual bonuses to living abroad that I’ve also gained – I’ve met and hung out with people I never would have in the US (for both good and bad), tried new foods, traveled to exotic locations, experienced other cultures, celebrated new holidays, expanded my horizons, yada yada yada (don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to downplay what I’ve gained — but I’m sure everyone says the same exact things about living abroad, and do they really sound any different coming from me?).

I don’t think I’ve lost that much by moving abroad — and even so the benefits definitely outweigh the negatives. Around November, I do miss the American holiday season, as ridiculously long and commercialized as it is. I’m sad to miss the occasional friend’s wedding. I know I’ve lost out on my old dream of getting my master’s by 22 and my Ph.D. by 28 – but I’m so glad I spent the last two years traveling instead of cooped up in some university library writing abstracts and hating academia.

What I really love about being abroad is that it has taught me to seize opportunities, explore the unknown, and take chances (and make mistakes, and get messy). For example, I wouldn’t be on this track to chasing my dream job if I hadn’t seized a random volunteering opportunity when I first moved to Singapore. So I guess relatedly, I’ve also learned to talk to as many people as possible – you never know who you’re going to meet, and how someone unassuming might just change your life two years later.

At home I used to be a lot more cautious and self-conscious; now I care much less about what others think of me, because ultimately I’m only living for myself. I don’t want any regrets. An example of this on a micro scale would be my approach towards photography. I used to not take photos when I was in certain situations (especially taking photos of food) because I didn’t want others to think I was some photo-happy Asian stereotype. Now I just snap away, because the people who know me don’t care, and the people who don’t know me don’t matter, as I’ll never see them again and I’d rather look back on the shot I have with happiness, than be bitter about the shot I don’t have because I cared more about what some strangers thought of me at the time.

I do feel at home here in Paris – and even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have doubts, because I believe everything works out in the end (let’s be clear, I don’t believe in fate, that’s different). It’s definitely not the location but my mindset – for me, home is anywhere I have a place to crash and a social life. Maybe that sounds a bit simplistic; maybe it’s just my youth speaking. But I don’t need a fancy furnished flat or a family around to call somewhere home.

I have no regrets about moving, living, staying abroad. Every day I love the fact that I am waking up in Paris, or that I would wake up in Singapore or Shanghai. The excitement never gets old; even after 15 months in Singapore I would still sometimes just stop in the middle of the street and think, Holy crap, I am living in Singapore. I have “life is good” moments a lot.

The Future

Oooooo, Australia!

Ultimately, I’d love to be working in any job that allows me to be a part of the Olympics and international sports scene, whether it be in journalism, media operations, or even working for a sports federation. So I’ll keep chasing that dream until I either get it, or I don’t. And if I don’t, well by then I should be trilingual in English, French, and Chinese, which is pretty handy. I have a couple backup plans as well, but they all involve travel in some capacity. I’ll never stop traveling.

A Totally Impractical Expat Interview #17: Edna Zhou is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

I’m under water, deep under the sea in a zoo of some sort. There is air to breathe, as the zoo is in a handy protective bubble. Then there’s an announcement over the PA system, casually noting that the air supply will finish in X minutes, thank you for visiting, have a nice day. My 5 year old somnambulant brain made the quick calculations and realized, in a fatalistic and resigned way that only 5 year olds can pull off, that the air would run out before I would be able to ascend to the surface as ascending takes Y minutes and the air would be all gone by X. I sat down on a bench and waited for my fate.

I didn’t care much for deep water after that.

These aquatic creatures won't kill me or drag me to my death. Especially the elephants.

I like swimming. I like floating. I love doing somersaults in swimming pools. I love being in water. I’d spend half my life floating on my back looking up at the sky if I didn’t have to put up with months of ear infections and deafness as an inevitable result. I’m half deaf as we speak. Three weeks in Thailand did it.

But like I said, I don’t care much for deep, open water. After all, as the PA announcement in my dream said, the air will be gone in X minutes but it takes Y minutes to get to the surface. Better to stay in a nice, shallow, clear pool where you can touch the bottom when you aren’t floating on your back.

Indonesia

Two and a half years ago, on the island of Bunaken just off Sulawesi in Indonesia, just around the area where the coelacanth was discovered a few million years after anyone last took notice of it, Doug and I did our PADI open water dive certification. I needed a lot of coaxing to haul myself meters under water, voluntarily ripping off my mask a dozen meters below, or voluntarily misplacing my breathing regulator to show the instructor that I was capable of not immediately dying under water. During my first dive, near a steep, dark drop-off, with a shelf plummeting to very deep depths before me, I threw myself backwards off an Indonesian re-purposed wooden fishing boat and realized, as I kept on plummeting, that my BCD had sprung a leak  and that I was most definitely sinking quite rapidly, well weighted down by an enthusiastic set of, well, weights around my waist. My inner 5 year old was muttering nihilistically, I told you so.

Are we done yet?

I passed my open water course, warily accepting that my watery death might not come as soon as anticipated. I got a new BCD (one that wasn’t leaking) and a slightly lighter weight belt (one that didn’t immediately drag me to the ocean floor). I learned how long it takes to safely ascend (technically it takes longer than I was given in my dream, so I suppose my initial fears were spot on). I became somewhat comfortable with the idea of being utterly reliant on a tank strapped to your back, a few tubes attached,  and an inflatable vest that hopefully holds it all together. I did, however, emerge with a horribly mangled middle finger where an oxygen tank had been accidentally let down onto it when everyone was taking off their gear on the boat. It took months but the nail eventually fell off after a slow and rather gruesome season where it wiggled on my blackened fingertip like a second grader’s front tooth. I used it to frighten my students, tapping their faulty essays disapprovingly with my mangled, discoloured claw.

Sometime that Autumn, with my nail still barely holding on to the nail bed and the fingertip a lovely shade of bruise, Doug found out that it was possible to do your advanced open water course through the Shanghai PADI center at QianDao lake, a number of hours by car from Shanghai. This is a lake that used to be a town until Mao decided he preferred the town to be 25 meters under water sometime back in the 1950s. It’s a silty, cold lake, with the underwater town part of it quite far from any other above-water town. We signed up for their last session of the year before they shut down for winter, bought thermal dive vests and hoods and gloves, rented two full-body wetsuits each, and girded our loins for the icy waters. My confidence in my ability to not die immediately underwater was still somewhat, shall I say, buoyant after my relative success in Indonesia that summer. I knew that I might very well die but at least I knew a few tricks now for how to do it less quickly.

China

Qiandao was my downfall. It was grim. It was freezing. Visibility was nil. We did our requisite deep dive, one of the mandatory exam dives that you have to pass to be certified, and when I got down to what might have been 25 meters I hit an absolute white out. The silt was so thick that I couldn’t even read my gauges. I had no idea beyond that point how deep I was or how much air I had left. I couldn’t tell up from down because the grey rainy skies had failed to penetrate the murk with any hopeful light. Not long after the white out hit, both of my ill-fitting fins fell off my feet and fell to the distant bottom of the lake. They are still there now, perplexing the fish.

I'm going thataway. Where the bar is.

We did the rest of the course over the weekend, chilled by the icy waters and pouring rain. The lake’s visibility made it pretty much impossible to do anything more than just gird your loins and cope. Somehow I passed and didn’t cry. We were taken for a lovely lunch at a farmhouse nearby then driven back to Shanghai. We didn’t dive again for two and a half years.

Well, we would have, if Doug hadn’t fractured his spine on a bus in Sri Lanka the day before our dive trip in Trincomalee was set to start. But that’s another story.

I promised him that, in spite of my lingering Qiandao lake nightmares, I’d join him in diving on our next trip to somewhere warm, which had clear water and less lethal buses.

I still had a brain full of leaky BCDs, murky impenetrable icy waters, fins dropping off my feet methodically into the darkness below.  I couldn’t remember when you had to inflate or deflate, nor could I remember how many of those compact little weights I needed to strap around my waist to keep from sinking uncontrollably to the bottom or, alternately, from bobbing up to the surface unexpectedly and getting mown down by a passing outboard engine. I had done my underwater navigation exam in the murky shallows of the lake, in the pouring rain, focused mostly on not freezing to death. My buoyancy exam had been done in fresh water, not salt. I just knew I’d end up in somebody’s propeller by the end of the next trip. I wasn’t, one might say, looking forward to it.

Thailand

Doug signed us up for four nights on a liveaboard in the Similan islands, somewhere off the coast from Phuket. Just before we did the liveaboard, we did a few tentative fun dives on Phi Phi, in sheltered bays, looking at turtles and Nemo a mere 18 meters under. No current, no steep ocean drop offs, no silt, no rain, no complicated coral formations that you absolutely cannot touch but must swim amongst in disturbingly close quarters. It was like diving in a rather large, warm, busy bath tub. I felt…okay. I wrote down what our refresher course instructor had determined to be my appropriate weights. I carefully committed to memory (again) which button inflated the BCD and which deflated it. I tried to remember when and why I’d need to inflate or deflate it (it’s not as easy as you might think). I logged my first two dives since 2009. My confidence in my ability to not die underwater was relatively high.

Then we moved onto the boat. Aside from us and a woman who had just done her basic open water course (but who was a triathlete and water polo enthusiast who appeared to come equipped with her own gills as she always emerged from dives with fifty bar more air than me, every time), everyone else was either an instructor, a dive master or just a keener with over 400 dives under their weight belts. We had 12. And five of those had been in an opaque lake, deep in panic and survival mode.

At the Tachai Pinnacle, holding on for dear life to the mooring line

There were currents out there. Washing machine currents. Currents that would rip your arms from your sockets as you made your way along various sets of mooring lines, building up callouses and bruises and shredding off layers of skin until they were raw and weepy, trying to not get washed out to sea or slammed into neighbouring boats. Amongst those currents were tumbled undersea boulders as big as houses, with gaps you were meant to swim through and coral you mustn’t under any circumstance touch. One of the British divers who had logged over 400 dives remarked casually that the Tachai sunset dive on our second day (one we had to bail out of when I was a dozen meters down the mooring line, inching my way down to the boulders, because the current had caught Doug’s spare mouthpiece at an unfortunately powerful angle and had managed to purge three quarters of the air from the tank before we had even started swimming) noted that that dive had been one of the worst he’d ever done. Ever. Currents coming from every direction and little visibility. It was dire.

I was shaken, to say the least. When Doug realized he had no air left, we carefully made our way back up underwater along the mooring line to the buoy, then along the next line back to the boat. Like sad, bedraggled, incompetent Navy SEALS who hadn’t made the cut.  Doug got back in the boat first and I waited out in the dark churning waters in the middle of the Andaman Sea, being bobbed and pulled, my arms in the air, body suspended, unable to inch any further without assistance as the rope didn’t lead to anywhere I could actually go, just to the blank hull of the boat. We did it again the next morning. Same dive spot. The current was still frothing like an angry washing machine, the mooring line shuddering. Doug carefully turned his spare mouth piece around so the purge button was away from the current. I carefully turned off my emotions and went down.

Earlier on the second day, I’d been caught in another strong current at the edge of a massive drop-off, about thirty meters down. One of those swimming to stand still ones. I sucked back most of my tank trying to get back to the others, then felt like shit because I made Doug return to the surface with me, even though he still had half a tank left. I was beginning to think I was not meant to be an underwater person. The dive guide quietly and patiently kept trying to calm me, to reassure me, to suggest I try to be at one with the water, to not fight it so much. And he was right, of course. Ellen the Triathlete, who had just done her basic dive course, was down there swimming like a fish, barely breathing, kicking in a perfect and minimalist fashion as I chugged back the oxygen like I was at a frat party and tried to not slam into boulders.

At night in the swaying bunk bed in our cabin, I started to realize that it wasn’t the water that I feared. It wasn’t the water that I felt uncomfortable with. It was me. It was the equipment. It was me and the equipment. I wasn’t a fish. I wasn’t a turtle. I would have made an awesome turtle. A turtle doesn’t need dive gear. A turtle doesn’t need to monitor its gauges or worry about leaky BCDs or being incorrectly weighted and popping up to the surface to have your head made into mincemeat by a passing boat motor. A turtle just swims. It goes wherever it is that turtles go, at a turtle’s pace. Same with fish. I could be a very happy fish. It’s not the water I feel uncomfortable around, it’s all the external crap that needs to be constantly monitored: ascent, descent, equalizing, nitrogen bubbles, getting your regulator caught on something during a swim through and having your air source ripped out of your mouth, staying close enough to the corals or the boulders to avoid the current but not so close that you actually touch them.

When I’m down there and it’s not all going horribly wrong, like on our third and final day at Richelieu Rock when I had 4 untraumatizing dives in a row, I feel good and sane and I think, by gum, I think I’m okay with this. I still feel utterly vulnerable and incompetent, sure, but my inner turtle has more leeway. The gangly, ungraceful human is pushed aside long enough for a little finesse under water to emerge. I can look at the pretty fish, the coral, the weird ass marine life; I can manoever myself through awkward openings, enjoy the feeling of buoyancy and movement, be briefly at one with the water.

Briefly.

Then the current picks up and I get washed out to sea, slammed against a boulder or two and then eaten by formerly plankton’tarian whale sharks.

Self medication for those moments when you realize you're never going to be a turtle

Notes on Scuba Diving in Thailand (and Elsewhere) for the Non-Amphibious is a post from: A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai