Ah, China

It has come out of my mouth countless times in the two weeks I've been here. "Ah, China."

 

This is a country that is developing and changing rapidly, so eleven months makes a big difference. The statistic is apparently 400 new cars on the road every day in the city of Shenyang alone. Sure, it's a city of 8 million people or so… but 400 new cars a day?! Times eleven months of being gone, and it's something like 132 thousand more cars on the roads now than when I left. Needless to say, traffic has gotten significantly worse. Significantly.

 

Ah, China.

 

Another change I noticed upon coming back: oreos with green cream are available at the average convenience store now! One of my friends and I used to make trips all the way across the city to the one store that sold mint-flavored oreos, because they were so good yet so hard to find, so I was excited to see the green packages all over the place when I got back. Finally, mint making in-roads into the Asian tastebud! Or so I thought… I decided to splurge and pick up one of these nice packages of green cream oreos. Never thought to actually read the label before making the purchase. I definitely got home not to mint-flavored oreos but to matcha-flavored oreos. Matcha, that incredibly potent green tea powder from Japan that can be used to flavor ice cream or bubble teas, is delicious in the right context. Oreos, when I'm expecting then to be minty, is not the right context.

 

Ah, China.

 

Turns out matcha-flavored Sprite is not the right context either. Another new item failed.

 

Ah, China.

 

I was having lunch with my Ghanaian brother the other day and was telling him about the place I'm currently living. Last time I was here, he and I were in the same building – the "home for foreign friends" at the university. The dorm has adopted some pretty ridiculous rules, so he has actually moved out into his own place off campus. And I've been to his place; it's pretty nice. It's a new complex, with everything that means: beautiful façade of a building, nice landscaping on the grounds, etc. These new complexes are going up everywhere, but it's only the growing middle class who can move in to these comparatively expensive places. So I told him about where I am and how much I am enjoying the authenticity of my experience living not in a dorm for foreigners or even in one of these new, middle-class complexes, but in a "real Chinese place," as I put it. "You know the kind of place I mean," I told him. "I have to step over piles of smelly garbage to get out of the complex. I love it!"

 

Ah, China.

 

But no experience living abroad is ever complete without the fun and adventure of grocery shopping – which, in many countries, is done in the farmers' market style of buying fresh produce on the streets, but unlike in the U.S., these street vendors are the cheapest way to go. An actual grocery store? Way too expensive and less flavor in the produce. So I was picking up some tomatoes and cucumbers from the street on the way home. Dodging the muddy puddles from the overflowed fish tanks, moving past the rows of raw meat, skipping over the baskets of every size and color of egg you could ever imagine… no big deal, until I almost tripped over the live chicken just wandering his way through the street with me. Not quite like shopping at Safeway!

 

Ah, China.

 

I love just about every minute of it.