We've Come A Long Way Baby!

September 2nd marked our two year anniversary in China. To recap, over the past two years we:

- have gotten used to seeing people in the street who are wearing pj's at 3PM, spitting pretty much everywhere (including right in front of us), and parents cradling their children over plastic shopping bags and encouraging them to "take care of their business".

- realized that Chinese traffic laws actually make sense. Bigger is better: trucks before cars before motorcycles before bikes. Pedestrians, of course, rank last, and always have to make way.

- made it through hundreds and hundreds of DVD's of old movies, new movies, bad movies, and all manner of television series.

- started out at internships making $2-3/hr and then made like the Jeffersons and "moved it on up", not exactly to the East side, but we managed to get real jobs with companies that didn't consider using Google as "consulting". Oh, and we now have air conditioning and heating that actually works!

-wrote 154 blog entries.

- visited 9 different countries and territories (China, Japan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, plus Hong Kong and Macau).

-ate many strange foods: animal parts ranging from pig ear to stomach, intestine, duck neck, "smelly" tofu (why anyone would eat a food with a name like that we have no idea), and durian, possibly one of the worst smelling and tasting fruits of all time, to the point where it is restricted from being eaten in many public places.

-had 34 different visitors.

-undergone 1 major surgery performed by a local Chinese doctor.

- spent many more hours at the "Fabmo", or fabric market, than we care to remember, ordering over 16 suits, countless shirts, costumes, jackets, pashminas and a mountain of silk products. And of course we may have supplemented our wardrobes with a few knockoff brand name items here and there. Zach in particular couldn't resist the $65 Armani suits!

- had our bodies pounded and massaged for somewhere in the range of 150 hours.

-seen more Broadway musicals in Shanghai than Zach saw during his 5 years living in NYC.

It's been a wild ride, and we've enjoyed every minute of it. We hope you've enjoyed reading about all of our adventures, and we look forward to recording plenty more as we enter our third year in the 'Middle Kingdom'.

Thanks to all of you for reading!!!