The Last Embers of Summer

Whirlwind would be the only way to describe the final, final part of Jen moves back to London via the rest of the world. Within a span of, technically, a day and a half, I found myself in two countries and three different time zones.

Shanghai

I returned to Shanghai via Hanoi and with 48-hours left to go and my Dulwich friends having returned to work already, I had a love affair with all things Shangers. I had a massage, shopped at Madame Mao's Dowry, sat down and had two glasses of prosecco at Citizen, one of my favourite haunts. 

I also met friends for a final drink at Le Vin, the tiny, wonderful wine bar with the wonderful waiter and his wonderfully generous pours of wine.

And on my final morning, I rallied the troops to join me for a final epic Shanghai Sunday brunch. We gathered at Isola in the Super Brand Mall to toast two years gone too quickly. Two courses and bottomless prosecco later, the tears at bay, I bid farewell to my friends, hopped in a taxi back to Clare's, grabbed my bags and made for the airport one final time. I couldn't think of a more fitting conclusion to my time there.

California Interlude

My flight out of Shanghai took me back to Michigan via Los Angeles (and a six-hour layover), or LAX airport, to be more specific. Shanghai to LA is a 12-13 hour flight, depending on the jet stream. The time difference is roughly 15 hours. So let's do some maths. I left Shanghai at 6pm on Sunday and landed at something like 3pm on Sunday (technically going backwards in time) only to leave LAX at 9pm the same night and land in Michigan (a three hour time difference from California, 12 from Shanghai) at 5am on Monday morning. Do those numbers crunch? 

To make matters even more complex, my 6-hour stopover coincided with the end of my parents' trip to California to visit family. They finagled seats on my flight back so we could all fly the red eye together. I must have been delirious because I only remember the next few hours in dribs and drabs. I slept not a wink on the Shanghai to LA flight. So when my godfather and parents came to pick me up at the airport and whisk me away to a quick family reunion of sorts, I made noises that sounded like conversation. I remember what the pictures tell me:

 

Back to Michigan 
Once on the flight to Michigan, I conked out in my seat whilst we were still on the runway and woke up at wheels down five hours later. The jet lag, oh the jet lag. But it was my first trip back to Michigan during the summer in years and I revelled in backyard barbecues, cool August nights and, most importantly, reunions with family and friends.

All went well until Winston got skunked. Which is how Jaclyn and I found ourselves in rubber gloves on the front porch rubbing down a yellow dog in tomato juice. With four hands on him, Winston loved every minute of it:

The skunking was a brief distraction from niece watch 2016. Catey was due in early September but having early signs of labour. So as we waited for the newest Avila, I delighted in unpacking my entire backpack and sleeping in one bed for longer than two nights. And finally, on the 24th of August, I made my final flight of the summer: back to London, back to Paul, back to the reality of a new job. The feeling was bittersweet and looking back now, I can't believe how quickly China came and went, how ridiculous Summer 2016 was.

I'm grateful for it all.

Prepare for Takeoff

The movers are coming for my shoes tomorrow. They're also coming for my picture frames, my giant cleaver that reduces garlic to tiny slivers, the assorted goods compiled over two years of life in a new country.

I can hardly believe it. I mean, i've been counting down in that masochistic way you might poke a bruise. You know it will hurt but still you do it.

And what's there to say that, in another one of life's moments that provokes triteness, hasn't already been said? At the beginning of this journey, my brother and I got into an argument. His sentiment: 'But who's going to help you if you get sick? You don't have any family there. You're so far away!'

There's no denying that China is far away; it is so, so different to anywhere I've ever travelled to before. But the expat bubble that has become my life abroad has its perks, the biggest of which is the establishment of my Shanghai family. The people who invited me to dinner when I was new; who walked my sobbing ass home when kidney news invaded; who orchestrated several weekends away to destinations unseen; who helped me keep the Thanksgiving tradition alive; who ate, drank, commiserated with me during both very sad and very happy moments.

I'll see these people again; this I know. But it's the end of an era, so this week, I'm allowed to weep a little bit.

Hangzhou

In the death throes of the school year I decided to take the role of 'trip organiser' and I rallied the troops (if you can call seven teaching-exhausted women troops) for a weekend away in Hangzhou, home of tea plantations, fancy hotels and general tranquility, or whatever the Chinese counterpart of this might be.

The original plan was to head to Yangshou near Guilin but that involved a flight followed by a three-hour bus ride and that seemed like too much of a headache. Instead, we opted for a one-hour train journey to the leafy vegetation of the five-star Millennium Hotel Hangzhou. I'm getting classy in old age.

Hangzhou is a city known for its beauty, in particular West Lake, a large inland lake laden with cherry blossoms and rural trails. Our hotel was a few kilometres away from all of this but we didn't mind; less lake, less crowd. Neither did the rain--all weekend it poured steadily down. 

As such, much of our adventure involved indoor pursuits of our hotel: swimming and gyming and drinking wine in good company.

In a brief window of reprieve, we made it outdoors and were rewarded appropriately. Fields of tea stacked themselves up the hills and we even found a properly Chinese meal.

As far as last weekend trips with friends go, I couldn't complain. 

Goodness Gracious Great Wall of China

Yep, I went ahead and made that pun. I'm allowed to because, in yet another feat of personal human stupidity, I decided that running a 10k 'adventure race' up a crumbling section of the Great Wall of China was a good idea.

Out with a bang was the gist of it.

So with less than five weeks left in China, I trekked up to Beijing via train to do the Conquer the Wall Marathon. Well, others did a marathon. What ensued was the most disorganised race I've ever run; think twice before you consider it.

But despite the 2am wakeup to meet at the hotel venue for 3am to hop on a 4am bus ride to get to the line for a 6am start, the views were spectacular: like I always thought the Chinese were a little bit crazy but then you see the wall and that sentiment takes on a new meaning. With views like this

you hardly have a moment to catch your breath before your propel yourself up, over and back down sections of one of the seven great wonders of the world.

3 hours, 396 flights of stairs and 14.1k on my Fitbit later, I crossed the line having taken a gently sloping trail through the woods, up to a vertical crumbling section of wall that willing victims had to scramble up and then slide down, onto a new section of the wall, over, back, across, through, up, down, back.

 

 

It felt like winning. 

Correction: I didn't die, thus I won. And, really, one can hardly live in China and not go to the Great Wall. Lifetime bucket list: tick.

Bills, Bills, Bills

This week (it's Monday), it appears I suck at adulting. Washing dishes, paying bills, it's all got the better of me and I just don't want to do it. Instead, I want to throw my fists in the air and scream NO at the top of my lungs and then kick my legs back and forth in a frenzied rage. Then I want people to walk past me without paying me any mind.

I got to the end of today after a big whole-school event that I've run and realized two things: 1. Is it really only still Monday?  2. NO! The event went well but the gallons of adrenaline coursing through my veins stay with me hours later.

So upon arriving home, I wanted to quaff wine in a darkened room with the dulcet tones of Sade soothing me into a semi-comatose state of forget. Instead, for the second time in the last seven days, I arrived home to an A4-sized overdue bill pasted to my door. With myriad characters, numbers and a sign that resembles a gas flame, I can only hope it's my gas bill and not a BBQ someone ordered to my address and expects me to pay for.

There are multiple kickers to this situation. Most importantly, I cannot read this gas bill. The website I am directed to has an English site that reads 'error' when I try to navigate. Slightly lower on the totem pole is that  I never received a bill in the first place. This is not the first time. With no key to open it, the door to my little postbox flutters open and I suspect one of my neighbors is playing a mean trick on laowai me. Or perhaps, it's the fact that I will receive a bill for next month that makes no mention of this month's unpaid bill. Because that's not how Chinese bills roll. But that won't stop them from shutting off my gas unless I pay online with the AliPay account I can't set up because I can't read Mandarin. Or go to the office by Friday at 4pm which is impossible because I have a job that takes over every waking moment of my life. And on and on and on.

I have no right to be angry. I can't read (or speak) Chinese with any level of efficiency and I'm living in China. And yet. Right now, it all fills me with uncontrollable, screaming at the top of my lungs, rage. Which is, of course, the cue for my upstairs neighbour to start practising his violin.

Camping in Yaolin

The Duke of Edinburgh Award is a pretty fabulous school programme. Its basis: promoting leadership, service and challenge to British School students worldwide. I've been involved with DofE since the start of my teaching career and find particular value in the expedition part of the award.

This year, I accompanied a group of Bronze students on their three-day expedition to Yaolin, a four-hour bus ride from Shanghai.

Upon arrival, my group of seven students was appointed a guide from the tour company, Insight. Past guides have generally been 19-year-old untrained gap year students wanting to travel on the cheap so i was skeptical. We, however, were gifted with Mattijs, a dishy Dutch vegetarian with a taste for reading Dostoyevsky in the English because he found the Dutch translations 'a bit too tricky to deal with.' Besides being in literary heaven, Mattijs became the students' rock as they trudged their way through trails (a term I use loosely in the Chinese context), over mountains and across streams. My kids learned how to use a compass, how to triangulate a location if you're lost, how to set up camp and leave no trace. 

We, again, witnessed the beauty of the Chinese countryside and the paradoxical fear of its future. Logging trails dotted the landscape that didn't exist the year before and we had to wonder what this place would be like in ten years' time. 

For me, I wild camped for the first time in my life and impressed the group with my Promethean fire making ability (thank you summer camp). More importantly, I had one of those i'm-so-happy-with-life moments that come and go far too quickly. 

Returning to school on Monday was a supreme let down. Something about being in the woods makes data, deadlines and school agendas seem inconsequential. I spent the ensuing week in a haze of woodland cheer, a confusing feeling in the middle of an increasingly hectic school term.

I debated career changes. In fact, I still am. 

Moon Landing

The countdown is on. The countdown is real. 18 months after arriving in this crazy little huge metropolis I currently call home, I find myself preparing to pack up my bags and head back to London, that other little huge metropolis I call home. I won't leave until mid-June, and even then, I've got a summer of travels. To Hawaii, to Japan, to Malaysia and Vietnam. 

Nevertheless it’s bittersweet. Shanghai has been nothing short of provocative and every adventure, every travel has been tinged with a surreal this-isn’t-my-life kind of feeling. In China, I’ve never felt like I remotely fit in. But it’s funny how you learn to deal with and then, later, embrace that feeling. You become a curious Other, looming on the fringes of a society you will never understand and, often, care not to.  

I’ve read a lot of articles on the matter of expat life and the continual exodus of people, of changing faces—the exit, re-entry, as if we’re a group of people contemplating the moon landing and subsequent return to Earth. Never having been to the moon, I can’t say with any certainty this comparison is apt. But I can imagine that China and the moon have a lot in common; the moon and expat life, even more. There’s a metaphorical zero gravity I can’t quite put my finger on.

Perhaps part of this weightlessness is the notion that, in the teaching world at least, you give two terms notice (a cool eight months) before you’re set to leave. So for eight months, you gear up and gear up and build up an angst between I-know-I’m-leaving-but-I’m-still-here-trying-to-enjoy-the-present. And you build bucket lists with a group of people who've become your Shanghai family. People who, two years previous, were faces on a website and names on a list. More depressingly, people, many of whom once you leave this place, you will never see again.

With these individuals you experience a gamut of day-to-day that, in reality, is rather mundane but to the outside world is a feat larger than life. The sighs and pauses from friends and acquaintances: “China…phhhhh…I could never do that. What about their human rights? Don't they eat their pets?’ You laugh and dispel myths as the ambassador for your adopted land. But niggling at the back of your mind is a question: how do you leave the moon and ever return to the real world?

I’m hoping the answer to this is with a list of adventures to return to. In London I get Paul, I get sausage dog ownership, I get ukulele group lessons, I get British citizenship.  And I prepare for a mission to Mars; somewhere in the distant sky it looms.

Harbin, the Snow Sculptures

As if the Ice Festival weren't enough, just up the road lies the Snow Sculpture Park. These aren't your Michigan winter's day snow forts. The city trucks in tons and tons of snow and team compete to build these epic feats of frozen water: 

 Flowers glued onto the trees. Because, China:

 Just warming up:

 

This sculpture is meant to encapsulate China's brave mission in defending their rights in the South China Sea. Yes, folks, you're looking at political snow: 

 University teams:

 Renee trying her hand:

 

 

 Hot chocolate stop:

 

 

Health and safety:

 Ice and snow. Snow and ice:

 

 A little New Zealand touch:

 And suddenly we're in Moscow:

 

 

 With the ice pagodas:

 And the Penguins of Madagascar:

 And roman nods to antiquity:

 We ended our trip with a two-hour traffic jam and a temple:

 

 

 

Great weekend. Crazy place. I'm feeling very, very grateful that I passed up a job opportunity in Harbin years ago.