I just realized that I have been in China for a whole year. I still remember that last year Chris and I got to Shanghai on July 28th two weeks after our honeymoon in Cancun. I was very excited that day as I have always wanted to come back to China because I missed my family a lot and I felt like it will be great to see my family and friends a lot since we came back.
Luckily Chris and I both found our job in October and I finally said goodbye to science as my new job is related to business management. I was enjoying my work for the first two months and I was sent to Nice, France as an interpreter during a defense. Nice is a small but nice city and I enjoyed my stay there - even it was a short visit and the weather wasn’t wonderful for going to the beach.
We spent our first Christmas in Hangzhou city, which is an ancient city nearby Shanghai. No parties, gifts, or family get togethers, but we had lots of fun there. Walking around the very famous West Lake made us refreshed from work. We both were super excited by having our first American breakfast in a nice cafe by the lake. After this I realized that I miss America a lot. Shanghai is a great city to live in but things are a bit different than I thought. People living here are always busy everyday and stressed from the continuos increased price of apartments. Even if I was living in the same city with my younger sister and my best friends I barely got together with them since we usually had to work during weekends. How sad it is!
Spring festival is the most important holiday in China and everybody will be returning from the cities they are working in and getting together with their parents and family in their home towns. The train and plane tickets then will be super hard to get and there are always lots of people rushing to railway stations and airports everyday during the holiday. This is the famous Spring Festival travel rush which happens every year in China. Because of this, I had trouble buying our train tickets but luckily we managed to buy plane tickets. Unfortunately, it came with a high price. So I decided to never visit my hometown during spring festival again. But I said that every year before and I still always went back to my hometown the next year. Even if we was not happy with the tickets, we both had a great time visiting my family. And for sure everyone loves Chris a lot!
Things were getting better in Shanghai and we found a lot of nice restaurants here. We go to Pizza Classic often for a nice, cheap pizza and Bella Napoli for fancier ones. I must say thanks a lot to Carl’s Jr. Chris can enjoy decent burger every week as I know how much he loves burgers. There are also a lot of Japanese restaurants in Shanghai and I was surprised that Chris became a big fan of sushi and sashimi! We also got to visit the most famous water town, Wuzhen, and had a lot fun staying there. The most surprising and interesting thing in Shanghai is karaoke, we usually call it KTV. KTV is actually very popular in China and it’s a very important part of Chinese night life and culture. We both love KTV a lot and we can spend a whole afternoon in our private room singing and eating.
