We saw six bulls and three matadors, what is typical for an afternoon. Each showdown was pretty short and I don’t recall it lasting much longer than 15 minutes. Each time a bull came out, the matador greeted the new bull with some maneuvering of his large cape.

Throughout 2003, we did so many fun things together including trips to the beach, wine nights, salsa dancing classes, shopping, spin classes and so so much more. And she helped us out when we got ourselves into pickles and was even there on the scariest night of the big earthquake after we had just arrived in our new city.

Talking with him reminded me of all that we have learned living here and the naivety of a newbie. His business is commodities trading of some sort and his boss from Texas had sent him here because the China office was not meeting their deliverables and seemed to be disorganized. He has grand plans of getting things organized and fixed up in a few months while at the same time traveling extensively to Japan and India as well. I just looked at him and smiled and said, “good luck with that.” After that, he was talking to my friend Junie and he turned back to me and said, “you guys are depressing.” I asked why and he said that I had shot down his plans of doing well, rapidly at work and then Junie was explaining to him why you should not give money to children begging on the street. (Often, the parents will do cruel things to the kids to put them in a pathetic state in order to exploit them for money. Junie should know as she has spent countless hours volunteering at an orphanage that had kids without thumbs and eyes from parents doing just that. Also the kids on the street are not in school and by giving them money it encourages the cycle.) I quickly agreed with Junie and the guy looked genuinely depressed. I really had forgotten how much we have learned living here and it took a guy fresh off the boat and eager to succeed to remind me of all of the lessons learned.

I have been ready for a new job for quite awhile…really ever since we moved here. I finished my MBA last year and now have over eight years of experience at HP, most recently a lot of coordination and project management but still a fair amount of programming. My goal has been to move into a project management role, but it has been nearly impossible to do while we are in Shanghai since if you are hiring a manager, you either want a local hire or experienced manager from the US as an expat. In February, a great Project Manager within my organization decided to leave the company to become the R&D Manager at a start-up in Boise. I put my feelers out about the job and started getting a lot of feedback that I would be a good candidate to replace him.

I am reading an interesting book that comes highly recommended by two separate close friends called “Eat Pray Love.” It is about a woman’s year-long journey recovering from her divorce through Italy, India and Indonesia. I believe it is getting a lot of press in the U.S. right now. I just finished the “Pray” section where she is living in an ashram in India for four months finding God.

I think my favorite thing about living in Shanghai is that I learn many things every day that I feel are shaping who I am as a person. I also like the fact that when I wake up in the morning, I never know exactly what is going to happen that day and where I might be having dinner or who I might be having a conversation with later that evening. These past two weeks have exemplified these attributes of life in Shanghai.

77. You cannot say a number without making the appropriate hand sign
78. You like the taste of Green Tea and Chivas
79. You start recognising the chinese songs on the radio and sing along to them with the taxi driver
80. You feel insulted when you enter a restaurant and only three waiters welcome you

On the trip to the Yellow Mountains, a discussion came up about the KTV karaoke bars that are all over China (over 40,000 locations.) Apparently they serve a larger purpose than just karaoke. You can order women to come into your private room and sing to you or do much more than that… All of us American expats at HP were completely clueless and people could not believe that we didn’t know. Here we were thinking that karaoke at KTV was good, wholesome fun. I guess it can be…basically you can specify if you want a G-rated or R-rated room. CRAZY! We were so naive.

Avril replaced “thank you” with the Chinese equivalent “xie xie” and the fans went nuts. She tried to say one sentence in Mandarin which apparently meant “How are you all doing tonight?” but the crowd fell eerily silent. Without using the correct pronunciation, the Chinese do not understand (I didn’t understand her either). Slightly embarrassed, she tried saying it again but in English and the crowd, yet again erupted.

We all chatted for maybe an hour and a half and then the French guys invited us to follow them to a crepe restaurant around the corner that they recommended. A Dutch woman and another woman from either Australia or New Zealand (based on the accent) joined us. We all had one dinner crepe (not sweet, mine had mushrooms, ham and parsley) and one sweet crepe. Both were excellent! The food was from Brittany and I learned that that region of France is famous for sailing so I added that to the list of reasons why we want to go to France (right now the list contains the wine, the Tour, the food and the melody of the French language.)