A bit different

Hey Toto, we're not in Cedar Rapids anymore!

Everything is a little different here. Thankfully, I met a girlfriend from my building early on who had only been here in Shanghai a couple months longer than I. But, she had completed other expats assignments (most recently Germany), and to me, she is a pro-expat-mama! She shared something that has stuck with me...{now imagine her super awesome British accent}...

I don't tend to surround myself with negative people -- they just bring me down.

People may hate it here. They may never make it feel like home. But a bad attitude really makes it 10 times worse than what it could be... or should be. We only have a couple year here, so I've heeded her advice, and instead we try to find humor in the ridiculousness of this culture.

Go ahead, laugh with me....
The tree cutting business (or any industry that typically requires hard hats) is a joke! This is a photograph of some tree work being done at our compound. Not only did they not have the road/walkway blocked off, but he used a completely unstable ladder that was too short, with a knife that looked appropriate for pumpkin-carving. 

The irony of this situation was that the limb actually did fall and hit another man on the head. He was standing around smoking though... I mean, who would have been paying attention to falling branches!?! And yes, it knocked the hard hat right off. Casually, he shook it off and put his hat back on.

Another few meters, I ran into this cart-do-dad outside my apartment door. It was the delivery man, making his rounds. And my bestie, Bridget, wonders why her care package that was mailed on September 4th hasn't arrived yet?!?! We've come to the conclusion it must have fallen off!

On the way to pick up the kids from school, I ran across this man. Must have been his afternoon break - reading the paper, shoes kicked off. And why not relax in the back of your ride. A whole new meaning to tailgating, huh?

There is good that comes with this laid-back, non-rule, no-etiquette kind of city. First of all, if your phone is broken... no problem. Just head to any electronic counter along the side of the road and they will unscrew, rewire, test-out, and replace anything you need on the iPhone. And when they can't fix it, they'll sell you another. Don't like the price? Keep negotiating. Of course, you're probably gettin' the refurbished one from the last Westerner that got hosed. Either way, Cade was pretty amazed to see the inner-workings of the iPhone!

And, the added bonus... your kids are free to be kids! Tonight, as we took 8 kids out for dinner, it was perfectly acceptable for them to spend the last half playing football with balloons through the mall. At home, I would have been mortified, but here it's normal to let your kids run wild, bump into others passing by, and straight-up refrain from any ounce of mannerism that you taught them over the years. In the meantime, we just sit back and enjoy adult-time!