The Beginning

My first blog post from China . . . and it isn’t going to be about China at all.  Instead, to introduce this blog, I thought I’d tell the story that answers the question we’ve been asked by our family, by peers, by strangers in New York, and even by new friends we’re meeting here in Shanghai:

Why move to China?

I feel like this question can be broken into why move at all? and why someplace so foreign?  And these questions begin with a simple premise, why travel?  So I'll begin at the beginning...

Neither Matt nor I grew up as travelers.  I think Matt would agree with my childhood idea of a "vacation" as either camping in the Rockies or visiting the grandparents.  This meant that we truly appreciated the few special trips we did get to take.  I can still recall every experience from the week my parents took me to Boston, and Matt will never forget his first hotel stay.  Our only foreign experiences before meeting each other took me to Canada and Matt to a resort in Mexico.  We were travel novices when we met.

Matt and I first traveled together for my 21^st birthday.  He surprised me with a weekend trip to Napa Valley, including a plane flight, bed & breakfast, and wine tours.  It was by far the most extravagant and adventurous thing I had ever done.  While it wasn’t a long flight or extended stay, that trip still taught us that we were compatible travel partners, and it gave us a brief glimpse of life spent exploring new places.

oh so young in Napa

Then Matt graduated from college, and when his mother asked what he might want for a graduation gift, he somehow came up with the idea that he wanted to travel to Europe.  Next thing I knew, I was being roped into this adventure as well.  My parents bought us backpacks, we stuffed them with snickers, film (yes, film!), a month-long train pass, and a rotation of 4 outfits, and we were off!  We spent a month trekking through England, France, Spain, and Italy, and we had an absolute blast.  Every day brought a brand new assault on our senses.  Even getting lost provided hours of entertainment and discovery.  We naturally fell into a rhythm of life on the foreign road; Matt mastered the currency conversions and map-reading while I thumbed through our guidebooks and translated the languages.  The travel bug had bit in a big way.

on the steps of Sacre Coeur Basilica in Paris

 Luckily, Matt was about to embark on a year of study in Amsterdam.  Not wanting to be left out, I graduated early and headed over to the Netherlands to join him at the midpoint.  We got our first taste of living abroad, and it was delicious (like mussels, cheese, and good beer – mmm).  Even though we were in a studio apartment with a hallway that doubled as a kitchen and a shower that took up the whole bathroom, we loved how simple daily acts are made so much more interesting when done in a foreign way.  Riding the bus, buying groceries, even bicycling our laundry half a mile through the snow . . . somehow it was all so romantic in Amsterdam.  Due to the surprisingly small size of Europe, our flexible schedules as student & nanny, and an austere budget, we got to explore all over the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, as well as head back to Paris for a second tour.  Unfortunately, we were beginning to discover that the more places we visited, the more we added to the list of places we wanted to go.

Rotterdam (Netherlands) dock tour; it was freezing!

 

We began brainstorming foreign adventures that we’d love to take if only given the time and money.  Then we actually started saving for trips, and planning out how to take advantage of the time off granted to teachers and Matt’s precious vacation days.  An extra-long spring break became a tour of Scandinavia.  A business trip to London became an opportunity to spend a long weekend in Dublin.  A friend’s wedding in St. John turned into a weeklong shared villa and snorkeling with sea turtles.

Guinness mustache in rainy Dublin

King Matt of Denmark

enjoying a catamaran tour in the Virgin Islands

As much as we enjoyed these short vacations, we lamented that they were just that – vacations.  We looked back fondly at our time spent living in Amsterdam, and agreed that we would love to live abroad again if the opportunity presented itself.

Then Matt got a call from a colleague who told him about an assignment his company was posting in Dhaka, and was it okay if she recommended him for it?  And somehow the next thing we knew, Matt was on his way around the world to spend 6 wild months traversing rural Bangladesh.  I got to join him for a week early on, and then his final two months there.  If Amsterdam was our friendly introduction to the living abroad experience, Dhaka was our merciless initiation.  Yet despite the daily power outages, harassment from strangers, and constant stench of human waste, we still walked away from that experience with the attitude that we couldn’t wait to live abroad again.  

[On the right of this blog, 

you can find a link to our adventures in Bangladesh.]

Two big Americans, one small rickshaw in Dhaka

Visiting a Royal Palace in Bangkok

While living in Bangladesh, we traveled to Thailand and Malaysia as well.  Upon his return to New York, Matt got a job that sent him all over the world, including Milan, Prague, Peru, Turkey, Israel, Singapore, and Beijing.  But the more global his job became, the more he noticed a distinct focus on China as the major emerging market.  And so he began regaling me with news articles and random statistics and work projects that somehow all led to one conclusion: we should move to China.  With my blessing, he called an old contact, applied for a job, and with a huge leap of faith (including quitting our jobs, having a baby, and planning this move all at the same time), here we are!

If you’re still reading, BRAVO, thanks for humoring me as I ventured down memory lane, and welcome to our blog.