We're putting the finishing touches on Monday and it marks the beginning of the end, if you will. This will be our last month in China so we will not see another page in the calendar turn over in Asia, for a while at least. It also was the first day of a seven day work week. Next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are a national holiday for the Dragon Boat Festival, so we are working Monday through Sunday. I haven't done much research on what goes on here but I'm pretty sure some people race dragon boats. Julie and I are going to celebrate by going to a Chinese wedding.
If you remember those pictures of me getting "arrested", then you remember Jack. In addition to being a police officer, Jack is also the fiance to a fellow English teacher, Mina. Today Mina was excitedly handing out the invitations to their wedding, which is on June 12th. That's right nine days notice. Things are a little different over here. Another diversion from what Julie and I are used to is that the wedding starts at 10:34 AM. Get in, get out and get on with your day? I don't know, but we'll let you know.
Back to the this working seven days in a row thing. It may be a stretch for me to complain as I believe I work some of the shortest hours of anyone in my demographic, at least according to that Atlantic article I read this morning. Did you know that US men with less that 12 years of education have never worked less in the last 50 years than they do now, single mothers have never worked more which is also true for men with 16+ years of education ... glad to be fighting the stereotype.
What has been taking up most of our time is figuring out how we are going to get back to the states. Okay we have figured out we'll take an airplane, even though Julie keeps talking about taking a boat or swimming. The big issue is figuring out how to minimize the amount of RMB we want to carry back. The Chinese government will allow you to carry 20,000 per person (that's a little over three grand) without declaring anything at customs. Given a good chunk of our salary is back-end loaded in the form of bonus and reimbursements this adds some complexity in making our arrangements. If we could buy our tickets with RMB then we should be able slide under the limit, however if we buy them with a credit card it'll be close. So in order to avoid declaring anything I've been trying to work on the logistics to purchase the tickets with cash. During that time the tickets decide to jump about $500 so we now have cleared all the logistics and are hopeful the middle of the week will give us a little better pricing and we can finally stop watching ticket prices.
Day seven is behind us and we are looking forward to day six. Hope your week is off to a good start.
-Ryan
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