Last September I got the idea to spend some time in China. I’ve travelled to China many times before, but I had never actually lived there, and I wanted to experience first-hand how quickly things are changing in that part of the world. Of course, my timing wasn’t optimal. China had effectively shut down its borders because of COVID19 and the rest of the world wasn’t in a much better shape. Still, I forged ahead and as a result I’m now quarantining in Shanghai and I’ll spend the whole summer in Beijing.
While I was preparing for this trip and telling folks about all the hoops I had to get through, a friend of mine suggested that I should start a blog about my experiences. My wife and family immediately latched onto this idea and they’ve been pestering me about it for the last 3+ months.
I’m not much of a blog writer. I once tried to keep a journal as a teenager but got bored with it after a week and never tried it again. So, the idea of keeping a regular blog was kind of daunting to me. Do I have the time, do I have enough entertaining material, should I open the blog for comments and spend hours and hours answering comments? I still don’t have an answer to all of these questions, but I decided to take the plunge and I’ll see where it ends.
Rather than a collection of funny stories, and trust me there will be many of those, I also want to make this blog practical and include links to items I brought, forms I had to fill out that I wasn’t aware of, and lessons learned of what I could have done better. Even though the China immigration situation continues to stay fluid, there is hopefully enough practical information in here in case you want to repeat what I did.
Leendert's Musings 