pantsfarm

I got back to China last week, on Wednesday afternoon. Coming out of the airport I wasn’t really hit with the whole “I’m back in China�? feeling until I actually stepped out of the doors. Maybe it was just the sleep deprivation induced daze but walking through the airport and having to deal with the whole entry form process or handing my health/quarantine form off to a totally disinterested guard didn’t really set it off for me.

But coming out of those doors, the smell of cold Beijing air hit me and snapped me back to where I was, back in China. It was hard to try and catch a quick nap in the cab ride, as the driver seemed to have learned how to drive by playing Crazy Taxi. In retrospect I guess I should have expected nothing less from the only country that has put me into multiple moving vehicle collisions.

Better still, the next morning when I was biking in to work, some dude comes cruising through the bike lane, and rather than honking as he approaches me to let me know to move out of the way, he decides instead to bump me with his front bumper, then honk because my bike was in the way of his car. It was just a tap, but still, come on!

And so here I am again, back in Beijing after a week in the most un-Chinese city of Paris.

Paris was fun, seeing my family all together was fun, even though both were not without their problems. I ate a lot of rich food, I got a minor upper respiratory infection (cough, runny nose, etc), I did lots of things you can’t really do easily in China, and was reminded again of a lot of the things I had once found so frustrating about being in China.

After coming back, it was right into work and prep for my mother’s Thanksgiving feast on Saturday. Now having attended two years in a row, it’s no surprise to me that invitations have come to be sought after because they were both easily among the best meals I’ve had in those two years.

And, now it’s Monday the 26th. I’m another year older and I’ll have to reflect on that fact another time.