It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Adjusting to my new life in China has been quite interesting. For the first time ever I was completely and I mean COMPLETELY out of my element.  Sure I’ve spent several months back packing Latin America but you can almost always find someone that speaks English somewhere and often times signs are in both English and Spanish. It’s not like that here and if a sign is in English it may as well be in German because the translation is so poor most of the time I have no idea what it supposed to say anyway.

First off let me say that most Western people stick to Shanghai or Beijing and if they do get to my city at all it’s only for a day or two to see the terra cotta warriors.  I live in Xi’an. It’s a city of 9 million people and on any given day the total number of foreigners is less than 300. That’s including foreigners living here like myself, my family, and my husband’s co-workers along with tourists. So 300/9,000,000 means there aren’t a whole lot of people around here that look like me or can talk to me.

And yes I did say 9 MILLION. I’ve had several people message me and ask me what’s the closest big city to where you live? I only assume they ask because the only place in China they know if is Beijing. Well, I’m over 1,000 miles from there but I think 9,000,000 constitutes a big city.

Chinese people do study English in school but the quality of their English education is about as good as foreign language education in the US. If the student is highly motivated they can learn a bit of English but most just breeze on through only learning the basics.

I know a couple Americans on Facebook living in Beijing or Shanghai and when we talk about what it’s like living in China they may as well be living in different world compared to my experiences. There is no vibrant ex-pat community here. I don’t ever walk down the road and happen to meet someone that speaks English. It just doesn’t happen. It’s a very surreal thing living here.

I have finally made some local friends. There is a section of society that does speak English fairly well. The poor people don’t and the extremely wealthy don’t but the upper class do. When I say upper class let me put it into perspective: $433 USD a month is a very respectable wage here.

So in a nutshell there are 9,000,000 people in my city and I’d say maybe 2,000 that I can talk to until my Chinese gets better. I’m working on finding them but the going is slow.