Life In China

So Aaron is probably going to give you the male cut and dry version of how things are going and I'm going to do my best to tell you how we're doing. So hello and enjoy our adventure with us!

The best question is where to start. Well, we're living in the city of Suzhou. It's about a 40 min train ride west of Shanghai (which we plan to verify and check out on Saturday.) 6 million people live here, of which 20,000 are expats. Now I've had to re-adjust my thinking to the word "expat" - this includes everyone in the world, all nationalities, who is not a Chinese person - including all the Chinese who have changed their citizenship to Canada or Australia. One of the funniest things for me is to ask a Chinese person if they're from Suzhou and they say "No, I'm from Canada." What??? You're not Canadian, you can barely speak English let alone French! I think it's even stranger that they've immigrated to Canada (Australia tends to be the other popular one), changed their citizenship, clearly worked there for a while and then moved back to China. Why go through all that effort and then move back to China - I doubt I will ever understand. There are a lot of expats from South Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia. Bosch has a factory here and has brought a lot of Germans with them. The church we've been going to has representation from 24 different countries. It's quite amazing really. So those are the demographics.

Where we live is out in the middle of nowhere. This is a map I found on another bloggers website who's been living in Suzhou for several years. http://www.thehumanaught.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/suzhou-district-map.jpg We're in the orange blob at the top - Xiangcheng district. The old and interesting part of Suzhou is that dark blue small square in the middle. This is your typical Chinese architecture, narrow tree lined streets, street vendors, small pockets of markets every few blocks and then the gardens that Suzhou is known for. To the right (the green) is called SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park). It's about 15 years old and I think this is where most of the white expats live. If we want Western food, there's a grocery store in this area that we go to as well as a lot of international restaurants - I think there are 3 Mexican, there's a German type pub, a Sushi place, Indian and some others. It's about a 20 min taxi ride from our place. To the west of old Suzhou is SND (Suzhou New District) - it's in yellow. We haven't been there yet. This is where most of the expats use to live, but since SIP has been developed it's now mainly where Japanese and Korean expats live. A lot of the more established international schools are in this area. So SIP and where we live are areas with wide roads, high rise apartment buildings and then townhouses. There's really nothing interesting to look at. It's very sterile, boring and uninteresting. Fortunately, I found a bus that stops right outside our front door and takes us right into the center of the old city. It takes about 30 min and costs the equivalent of 30 cents. So we're pretty excited about that. I'm adding a picture here of the view from our apartment. We're not quite sure how far we can see, but easily 5 miles, if not longer. I'm also adding a picture of the old part of Suzhou.

So housing. Suzhou is a very wealthy city by Chinese standards. I think it's because of all the industries here, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. There are factories for Samsung, Bosch, Kraft, L'oreal and a whole bunch of others I didn't recognize. We don't tend to see a lot of really poor housing, although it definitely exists here. From what we can tell, most of it is newer apartment buildings. We do see some very sad homes, people doing laundry in the algae covered ponds or the sulfur smelling canal. This area is very humid, a bit worse than say the Virginia/DC area, and we've been really impressed with how many homes have A/C. From what we can tell these A/C units also double as heaters. So we are pleased that a fair amount of the people here have decent living conditions.