When we lived in London for one year and for two years, we wrote a lot about our experience, our thoughts and feelings about the transition, and everything we loved and learned along the way. But this month, as we were trying to distill down our first year as US expats in Shenzhen into pithy lessons learned, we had trouble. In some ways, our adjustment to China has been easier than London because we’ve done this before. We came in expecting weirdness and awkward moments, so they didn’t hit us quite as hard as they did in London when every tiny cultural difference surprised us.

On the other hand, China is so different than our home culture it’s almost too hard to narrow down the differences. What’s different, you ask? Um, everything.

So, instead of our Top Lessons or Best Moments or Hardest Adjustments to China, we’re taking a different approach. In no particular order, here are some of our favorite anecdotes that sum up our first year in China, and all the difficult, glorious and bizarre things we’ve seen and done along the way.

Our Fave US Expats in Shenzhen Stories

Bureau-crazy: We’ve written extensively about our visa application process, and it continues to boggle the mind. We’ve had to go through one renewal already and we’re embarking on another right now. Last year, after literal months of gathering documents, we appeared at a government office for our official appointment. ‘Where is your actual diploma?’ they asked? In my parents’ attic, of course. My official, certified document of my graduation is here in this pile, in triplicate. But no. We need your actual diploma. We cannot process your visa. Heads hung low, we slunk out of the office, slapped again with the brutal workings of an ever-changing bureaucracy. Back at the office, I sent HR an insane email about how we had done everything right and there’s another delay and I know exactly what box my diploma is in, but it’s 9,000 miles away. Within 15 minutes, HR called me, said they had ‘worked it out’ and I didn’t need my diploma after all. The next day we went back to the government office and turned in our paperwork.

Push Bike Grand Prix: One weekend, the plaza outside our apartment building hosted a push bike tournament for toddlers, with hundreds upon hundreds of little kids. Push bikes are bikes without pedals, the kind that kids everywhere learn to ride before graduating to something bigger. For two full days, hundreds of tikes and their trikes raced around custom built courses as their frantic parents screamed “加油” from the sidelines. A jumbo electronic leaderboard displayed lap times and trophies were awarded. There were tears. It was a silly event, but China’s focus on kids and their performance during competition has never been so evident to us.

Mongolian BBQ: Shenzhen is a massive city, so it’s easy to find yourself in a place you’ve never been before. One night, we were invited to a big group dinner at a restaurant made up entirely of individual Mongolian yurts. Each yurt was a private dining space, and this large restaurant had over thirty of them under one roof. Our group pre-ordered ‘half a lamb’ a few days ahead of time, which was wheeled into our yurt on a special push cart. Traditional singers and dancers entertained us via a tiny karaoke machine, despite our best attempts to get them to stop. We ate and drank ourselves silly for less than $20USD per person, and we pinched ourselves that such an fantastic and absurd place exists just a few miles from home.

Cancelled Concert: Last fall, Shenzhen was scheduled to host a massive concert in the local stadium. Flo Rida and Jessie J were to appear and there was a full court media push to sell tickets. I’m not kidding when I say that we saw an ad every day for probably three months leading up to the concert. Then, abruptly, three days before the big event, the whole thing was cancelled due to, “unavoidable circumstances owing to unforeseen issues pertaining to local production.” Um, what? Did they not sell enough tickets? Was there a safety issue from ‘local production’? Nothing further was explained or justified. Life moves on.

Hangzhou Hotel: My bizarre night at an airport hotel in Hangzhou last summer was notable in a few ways (and if you’ve missed this story, check it out in all its glory detail here). During that fateful night, I learned about the kindness of strangers and ingenuity of businesses, the weird law that restricts some hotels from hosting foreigners, and that I should never get into a random unmarked van at midnight.

Hooking Up Internet: Oh, let’s not forget the day when the cable guy came to install our WiFi in our flat. The apartment had been just renovated, the walls re-plastered and repainted. Unfortunately, the necessary cables for the internet were never pulled through during this process, something we discovered with the cable guy standing in our living room. We thought about contacting our landlord, or getting in touch with the building’s management to gain access to the building’s wiring. Well, there was no reason for despair. The cable guy, without much hesitance (or permission from us, really) got out his electric drill, drilled a hole from our apartment into the hallway, took off some hallway ceiling tiles to splice the wires, and hooked everything up. We were so worried about violating the building rules or our lease, we took frantic photos of the holes and the guy drilling. But no one has seemed to care, and we have WiFi, so no complaints. This would have caused a major installation delay in the US or UK. In China, it was handled in a matter of minutes.

*photo above: we learned how to buy train tickets. It’s the little things. #winning

Where’s the Bathroom?: We’ve talked a few times about how kids are potty trained by walking around without diapers, their astute parents lifting them over garbage cans to pee before any sidewalk accidents. And no, we’re not used to it yet. Anyway, a few weeks ago, we were standing outside a nice restaurant in a busy pedestrian area, and this dad and his small daughter left their table inside and came outside, mostly because the dad wanted to smoke a cigarette…we assumed. He proceeded to help her pull down her pants and she squatted for a pee on the bushes right outside the door, in full view of everyone walking by on a Friday night at 8pm. Then, they went back inside to resume their meal. Choosing a bush over a fully functional indoor bathroom is one way to go, I suppose.

How Many is A Lot?: This past fall, we experienced our first National Day holiday, one of the two major, week-long holidays in China (Chinese New Year is the other). We had heard how busy airports and train stations are on the official start and end dates, so we wisely chose to leave town a few days early. During that holiday week, over 750 million took to the roads, train stations, and airports to travel somewhere. That is twice the population of the US, traveling simultaneously. And consider this: the Pearl River Delta (which consists of our home city of Shenzhen, as well as other cities like Hong Kong and Guangzhou) is about the same size area-wise as the Bay Area in California. The major difference? The Bay Area has a combined population of 9 million. The Pearl River Delta has 66 million. When you are dealing with a nation of 1.3 billion, the numbers can be staggering. (photo below is the Great Wall, overrun with Chinese tourists during the holiday week)

School is Serious: We have a friend in Shanghai who owns a company that tutors Chinese high school students with the goal of getting into top US universities. Before this year’s Chinese New Year, he wondered when a family he works with wanted the tutoring to re-start after the holiday. The mother insisted instead that her son could not miss one day of tutoring under any circumstances, so she was going to pay for our friend and his wife to join them on their holiday for a week. The destination? Mauritius, an island paradise off the coast of Madagascar. They got free flights and a stay at 5-star luxury resort, as long as our friend tutored the student for 3-4 hours per day. The family was willing to pay for all of that to ensure that not one day of studying was missed.

Wow, people. A year in China has given us enough humorous anecdotes to last a lifetime, and we’re looking forward to all the crazy things that happen to us in year 2. Given that we’re both slowly adopting many Chinese mannerisms (drinking warm water, using an umbrella to block the sun), we’re hoping that we recognize bonkers stuff when we see it.

We will never get used to seeing babies pee into garbage cans….right?