Another anniversary

Some of you may have noticed that we didn't post yesterday, and since we are usually overly vigilant on posting daily, we figured that we should provide everyone with our thought process for that lack of an update.

One year ago yesterday, we took these two photos -

That's right, today we celebrate one full year of our life in China. By this time last year we had checked into a hotel in Shanghai for our first night, and we would have been sitting in a small noodle shop on Nanjing Lu discussing what we had done and what we were in for, and we were probably wondering if we weren't just slightly crazy for agreeing to this move.

Tomorrow night will be our one year anniversary of actually being in Xiamen, for memories sake you could re-read our first real post from China, or for good fun you could even re-read all of our July posts. I was trying to update our sidebar for the archives to add a calendar so one could easily scroll into the past and view our posts, but for some reason I can't quite get it to work and now I'm just overly frustrated with it. Actually we can't tell, you may see the calendar, and all of my frustrations may just come from all the hoops that we need to jump through in order to view our blog due to the restrictions in China. We also can't tell if anyone can see the videos that we post, so if there are any problems somebody be kind and let us know.

So when we stop and take a quick look back at our year, it really has been a lot of fun. We met a lot of great people when we first moved here, and that has built itself into some great friendships that we really cherish. We would hate to think about how hard it may have been to adjust to the differences if we hadn't had our friends. The year has gone both quick and slow, we are amazed that we've been here for a full year already, but sometimes it also feels like this is our home and we've been here for years and years. I think the speed of change to stores, building, roadways, really everything in China somehow distorts time. Xiamen is different then it was a year ago, especially as new high rise housing complexes rise up and the old buildings and small alleys and torn down and replaced. It'll be amazing to see what changes continue to happen here, just today we realized the street we always went to for getting our shoes polished had been totally cleaned up and all of the little stores and vendors are now gone...

Change is what China is all about. Yesterday we stopped over at our friends, the Mexicans, in the afternoon to bring Rene his birthday present and we ended up sitting and talking far longer then we ever expected to (it could be said that this is the real reason we didn't post yesterday). They are moving back home to the states next month, and we really will miss them. From there we went to another birthday party for another friend who is also leaving for home.
This is Vicky and her boyfriend Yoyo, she is moving back to England in two weeks. She's been here 3 years and is going through a lot of emotions dealing with leaving the China that she's fallen in love with. We can understand, for as much as we miss all of our friends and especially our families back home, we have truly grown to love China, its culture and its people - we do hope that does come across in all of our writings.