I am EXHAUSTED.

4 hours after I get home from the airport, I'm getting outta bed and ready for work. 我想死。。。

My wrists hurt, my legs and my core hurt, my toe hurts, my back hurts. My wife has a dozen bruises all over... How did we get here?

Part 1 - Chinese New Year: Ode to my new family

It has been a LONG few weeks. Immediately after me and the wife flew down to Shenzhen to get married, we flew back and I went back to work for 2 days. Then we flew straight back down to Shenzhen for a 6 day stint with the new in-laws for Chinese New Year.

For those who don't know, I'm a massive introvert. Like, when you do those tests online, I consistently get a more introverted result than any I've ever seen. I'm not isolated or anti-social, per se, but I have a very limited capacity to be 'on'. And I've basically had to be 'on' for two solid weeks.

You know, like always smiling, always 'up for it', always helpful and grateful, always appreciative of food or offers or suggetions. Always nodding and laughing and making jokes and ready to go at any given moment, whether it's to leave the bedroom to say hi to somebody visiting, or to see a thing on TV or whatever. Probably sounds like nothing to extraverts.

To me, it's overwhelming. My posture is forcefully upright constantly, I can never sleep as much as I'd like, and I have to eat everything regardless of whether I'm hungry or not, and it all has to be delicious.

I have to enjoy all the attention on me, trying to get me to converse in Chinese perpetually, and I have to think all the traditions, beliefs and wishes are all wonderful and agreeable ideas.

It's truly rough, an extraordinarily difficult 6 days.

At the same time, though, it was quite awesome, and not as bad as I anticipated based on previous experience. My shiny new wife's family is particularly cool, and I consider myself extremely lucky for that. My friend, in comparison, visiting his in-laws, is greeted with a shunning from the explicitly racist, disapproving mother, who would, for example, no longer drink something from a bottle he had previously touched.

I genuinely value the fact that I now have a new family, a funcitonal one that isn't broken apart and requires a police presence to keep one away from the other, or a parent who would rather disown their child than consider communication other than bi-monthly emails.

It's nice. It's wholesome. They show genuine gratitude for my existence and understand that I'm a bit of an awkward sod and don't judge me for it whatsoever. They always preface things with 'you do what you want to do, never more', and they repeatedly reminded me to no longer worry about financial issues, they have our backs, and my father in-law would keep joking about being my 'umbrella', protecting me against his daughter's bullying XD

We did fireworks together,..

...we cooked a big meal together

_{In case it wasn't obvious, my dish was the crappy version of Gordon Ramsay Fritters (top)}

...and we went to the beach together and had bbq.

It was wholesome and fun!

It's quite hard to explain to, well, anyone really, this conflict of feelings, as if they are mutually exclusive concepts; you can either have one or the other; love it or hate it.

I couldn't possibly tell them 'sorry but I'm tired of all this smiling and you're too noisy. I'm going to hide from y'all in the bedroom and try again tomorrow'. There is no level of politeness in the world that would make that sound ok. It would be immensely upsetting. Even after extensive explanations to my wife, this idea is still a bit alien to her - a semi-introvert herself.

I CAN love and appreciate people while also wishing they weren't around lol.

The whole trip was very enlightening to me (though not my first, but third time), learning with direct experience how a happy family actually functions. How playful and carefree the daughter is around the parents, or how they have brief bursts of disagreements which somehow fizzle out and everthing is immediately back to normal again, the way that each person has a role to contribute around the house, and how they can talk literally non-stop for hours on end with barely a moments pause for me to even interject.

These everyday normal concepts are weirdly alien to me, like I'm learning some bizarre, far-away culture hidden from civilisation in the untouched jungles of the Amazon. I have to say I'm fairly envious that I missed out on all these things growing up.

I think it's gonna be a cool future though, as long as I can keep hold of it without messing up!

Ok anyway... none of this explains why I'm so battered and bruised. That'll come later in part... 3? of this tirade of blogs.

Next up: Tokyo! Did I get robbed?? Did I start a bar fight?? Who knows!

Happy Year of the Dragon