#expatlife

Being an expat is weird. I was adamant when I came here that I didn’t want to be an ‘expat’ – I wanted to experience local things for local people. But that’s not really how it’s worked/is working out and I don’t know if that is because of the place I’m in or if it’s the same everywhere.

There are days when I really feel like an expat.  I don’t mean that as in ‘I feel really at home here’, I mean ‘living it up in Western places and paying ridiculously inflated prices for food and alcohol.’

I think there are a few reasons why. First of all, from what I can tell the entire bar culture here is fuelled by expats. I’ve seen no such thing as a ‘Chinese bar’ which means that most of the places we go in are full of expats.

Secondly I think this place is so much of a culture shock that you end up craving the familiar. Hence why I got so excited when I found Heinz tomato ketchup.

Thirdly, your body simply can’t take eating Chinese food all the time. And supplementary to that, it’s sometimes difficult to ascertain what’s safe and what’s not, so ‘going local’ isn’t always an option. Also, a lot of the people I’ve been hanging out with have been here a while so they’ve already done the ‘local thing’.

I work in a very Westernised, very sanitised part of town. Yes, I’ll go over to the mall and have a spicy soup and dumplings for lunch, but it costs £2.50 (which is expensive by Chinese standards) and above your head there’s about 15 floors of designer clothes, expensive handbags and overpriced electricals. Oh, and a Toys R Us. My building is connected to the other tower by another shopping mall, which is populated with Gucci, Prada, D&G etc etc. So when you pop out for lunch every day, you’re not really seeing the ‘real’ Shanghai.

Where I live is also quite like this. The first thing I see when I walk out of the subway is Burberry. I’m round the corner from an Aussie bar (which incidentally is awesome, has the cheapest beer here I’ve seen and has a killer pool competition on a Sunday afternoon). This week I have eaten Chinese, Japanese, French, American and Italian and every single one of those has been expensive. Add in drinks and it becomes extortionate.

And the expats tend to stick together – I’ve got to the point now where I will go to a bar and meet someone I’ve met previously – despite having 25 million people in this city, sometimes it still feels very small!