It didn’t take long for us to feel the difference between travelling as we had for the last 3.5 months and settling in as expats this past week. When on the road, you rarely need to: register with the police; get a medical exam; buy a cell phone; go to the Canadian consulate to prove the legitimacy of your marriage certificate; change your temporary tourist visa into a one-year working visa; look for an apartment; go grocery shopping; buy kitchen wares; etc. etc. etc. All of which we have done in our first week or are about to do in our second week of living in Wenzhou, China.

The official and bureaucratic steps (police registration, visas & medical exams) we expected – but we hadn’t been told about the need to have our marriage certificate certified….so off to Shanghai we will be going tomorrow to visit the Canadian consulate and have them bless (?) the piece of paper we received almost 27 years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia.

With the help of English First, Jacob’s new employer, we’re looking for an apartment and in the meantime living with the lovely Helena, a teacher at the school. Once we have our own place we’ll need to furnish it with kitchen stuff and stock the fridge and cupboards. The school provides the furniture including a clothes washer, TV, air conditioner – all the things vagabond teachers wouldn’t want to have to buy as they may not stay long enough to make it worthwhile.

A little about our new home city: Wenzhou is on the east coast of China just a little north of the island of Taiwan. It is a city of about 7 million inhabitants but that includes a ‘greater’ Wenzhou that we aren’t likely to see much of. Our little neighborhood is very high density with almost all structures 7 stories high (it is mandatory that elevators be installed in any building with more than seven floors – so guess how many floors most buildings have?).

We are within walking distance of English First as are all of the foreign teachers and staff so we have a ready-made community of expats. Our new friends are from England, South Africa, USA, Russia and the Philippines. We’re also getting to know a few Chinese people who are already associated with the school or its staff.

There are many shops nearby, banks, restaurants, markets: pretty well everything we will need. The area is crisscrossed with rivers and canals and so the neighborhood feels somewhat small because of the boundaries created by the water. There are modern skyscrapers – showing off the wealth of this part of the country – as well as older buildings in all sorts of architectural styles: Roman, Soviet, glass & steel.

So far, I only know a dozen words in Mandarin Chinese: hello, thank you and counting from zero to ten. But I’m already feeling the need to know a lot more as you can only go so far with pointing and pantomiming when you’re our shopping. I’ve been invited to join the English First Chinese class offered to teachers and I can’t wait to get going.

The reason we came Wenzhou a week early was to experience Chinese New Year’s in our new home. Fireworks are still going off a week after the start of the New Year. People are firing them up in front of their businesses to scare away the bad spirits on this, the first day of business in the New Year. What fun!

Zài jiàn (goodbye) for now.