Looking For A Breath of Fresh Air

Not a week goes by where Zach and I don’t at least find one or two customs or habits here that we find truly baffling. One that we just can’t get over is the local obsession with fresh air. Regardless of how cold it gets here, locals are constantly opening the windows in cars, restaurants and office buildings to get fresh air. I’m fortunate enough to have a window in my office, and if I so much as get up to go to the restroom, 9 times out of 10, by the time I get back, the window will have been opened by one of my windowless colleagues to provide ‘fresh air’ to the entire office.

Shanghai has a lot of wonderful qualities, but unfortunately, the air quality is not one of them. My office building has state of the art air filtering machines, yet windows remain open. In addition to the need for fresh air inside, locals think clothes can only be clean if they are left to dry outide. When we first arrived here, we decided 'when in Rome' and hung our sheets out on our balcony to dry. Needless to say, once we brought in our dried sheets, they were anything but downy fresh and had a dirty film that had settled in from all the ‘fresh air’. After that, Zach and I took to hanging our wet laundry around our apartment from the hall tree, towel racks, and chairs until we moved into our new apartment and were lucky to get one of the few combo washer/dryers in the city which does the trick. Of course, our ‘ayi’ (housecleaner) has lectured us constantly on how we should not be using the dryer, we can’t quite tell if she thinks there are evil spirits in the machine that rob our clothes of fresh air, or if it just makes ironing our shirts that more difficult. Either way, every once in a while we do come home to an open balcony door and an apartment full of ‘fresh’ Shanghai air trying to counteract our unhygienic ways.