It's the smells

Above all, I think it's the smells that make this feel so different than "home". I've always noticed it when I traveled outside the US, but it really hit me today somehow that all the different smells will be with me for the next two years! First of course are the "big city" smells. What is it about big cities that you'll be standing on a street corner and all of the sudden there will be the smell of rotten food & sewer? ick.
But then there are the smells in the stores. The grocery store, especially the produce section and the "prepared food" sections, have all sorts of smells that I've never encountered before and not many of them are appealing (at least not at this point!). And somehow this translates into the inside of my refrigerator smelling gross, even though what I've put in there is essentially the same as in the US. I breathe through my nose every time I open it up. :)
And the foam that we finally had to buy to put on top of our rock-hard Chinese bed smells like, well, I don't know how to explain it other than to say, it smells weird. But in a suffocating kind of way when you're laying on it trying to go to sleep. It's hard to say if softening up the bed is worth the weird smell. Joe says "yes", but my nose is a lot more sensative than his. The only thing so far that I can definitively say smells exactly the same is Tide laundry detergent!

One thing that has been really hard for us is throwing everything away. There is no recycling in China, so everything goes in the trash. It's so hard for us to do after being so conscious of it in Portland. But there is a little bit of paper recycling. There are guys who ride around on bicycle with a cart, ringing a cow bell. And they buy paper for pennies. They do some kind of recycling with it but it's unclear what. Our ayi asked if it would be OK for her to collect our paper and paper products to sell for recycling for a little extra money. Of course!

Speaking of our ayi, I forgot to mention that on her first day of work last Saturday she brought both the girls and me a gift! It's amazing to me that the culture of gift-giving when you go to a person's house is so strong that it extends to employers. Can you imagine in the United States bringing a gift to your new employer on the day you start? Especially when you can ill afford it? She brought both girls dolls and me a plant in a very nice pot. And in the process of receiving these gifts Xiao Chen officially started calling me Tai Tai, which literally means "boss's wife". (I still don't quite know what to do with that, but everyone assures me it's what all the ayis do and it's totally normal.) Ah, what exactly is "normal" for me these days anyway?