Ah, is it really the weekend again already? What a fantastically fast week! I'm sitting here having a perfect Saturday morning. I've got my mammoth size cup of instant coffee in my Guangzhou Starbucks mug. Have I mentioned there's a Starbucks in Guangzhou? Not that that's surprising, but it was a pleasent discovery nonetheless. So one day I bought a 20-ounch Guangzhou Starbucks mug. I can't wait to come home and drink real coffee in my mug! I've recently changed to a dark roast instant coffee and I'm enjoying that a lot more than the weak stuff I used to drink. How sad hey? The highlight of my mornings is instant Maxwell House. Oh well, it's a cheap thrill anyway! I just reread every single one of my update entries I've written since I got here. Wow do I have bad spelling and grammer when I type fast! Apologies for that, I'll really try harder from now on to proof-read everything before I post it. I've been wondering how well I've been doing at sharing my experiences here and what kind of impression I've been giving you all of life in China. It's made me very nostalgic, rereading the past eight months of my life. I can't believe how much has happened, how much I've seen and done, and how much I've changed because of it all. On days like today it's all so clear why I'm here, this has been, hands-down the best experience of my life and I wouldn't trade it for the world! I know sometimes I sound depressed or completely stressed, but that's all part of life, and even in the midst of all the emotional turmoil there are always rays of sunshine. Like last night, I had the most perfect dinner with the most perfect person in the most perfect restaurant and I was wearing the most perfect shoes and it was just this perfect moment that I could only have in China, and I'll always remember moments like that. Or this morning, I got a text saying there was mail for me at school, so I put on my perfect China-Saturday outfit and went for a perfect Saturday morning walk, and I got two perfect packages of chocolate from home (THANK YOU!!!). I'm seeing so much beauty in such small things, and I'm finding a whole new appreciation for life these days. Things are good, I'm good, life is good, and I'll always love China for giving me the opportunity to slow down long enough to see that.
Okay so now to the stuff you actually care about, what am I doing these days? I've been getting that question a lot and I'm never sure what to say. Life seems so ordinary to me here now. I woke up one morning this week to a cockroach party on my back patio. There were probably at least two dozen of the buggers in varying states of intoxication writhing and twitching right outside my bedroom. Clearly someone had put some poison out on one of the floors above me and all the roaches chose my backyard as their final resting place. While I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the cockroach situation I'm living in, that morning all I could do was close my drapes and pretend they weren't there. Fortunately a freak thundershower the next day washed all the dead bodies away and I didn't have to deal with a one! I've developped a passion for shoes lately. This is something very new for me, anyone who regularly looks at my feet will notice that I generally wear runners or plain blah shoes, if I'm wearing shoes at all, because really my first choice is to free my claustrophobic feet of all socks and shoes. But in the past three weeks my shoe collection has pretty much doubled. It all started with a new pair of pretty sandels that were cheap and cute and I just couldn't say no. And from there it has snowballed into pairs of shoes in every colour because black and brown are so boring, high heels to match a new skirt, and now I'm just buying shoes because I'm going out for dinner. Remember those perfect shoes I was wearing at the perfect dinner, yeah those were an impulse buy. I was at yoga on Thursday, and I always feel so good after yoga, and I had to go to the shoe store to pick up a pair of shoes I had special ordered in my size (I'm a nine in China!) and while I was there I saw these shoes and I just thought how perfect would those shoes be for dinner tomorrow! So I tried them on and it was like walking on three inch clouds, so I bought them, but they were open toed, so then of course I had to go for a pedicure and I thought I may as well get a manicure while I'm here, so I did, and then I walked home under a beautiful, quasi-stary sky in the balmy 25 degree heat that is our resbite from the 30+ temperatures we have all day and I was home before 9pm which meant I still had time to clean my apartment, do my laundry, watch an episode of Remington Steele, and still be in bed by 11. I mean what a life hey?! So maybe ordinary isn't that ordinary after all.