Living together
Having never been married before, I am amazed at how married life seems to suit me. I know this is only the beginning, the honeymoon period, quite literally, and that the acid tests will come later, after months, after years. But I think that the months writing to each other have been very useful in establishing our relationship and our views about the most important subjects.
I find that our temperaments are very well suited. Patience and determination. I bought a simple visual dictionary for my wife, with words in Chinese and English. We lay for hours on the bed, working out the correct pronunciation for things like parts of the body. She worked very hard at getting the words right, writing down an approximation of the English pronunciation in Chinese. We had a great laugh, getting it wrong, then getting it right. I had to admire her calm determination. It's things like that, striving to achieve something which makes our relationship stronger, which mean most to me. Not so much the great places we visited, fantastic though they are. It's more the ordinary, everyday time we spend together, eating, walking hand-in-hand, buying food, watching bad TV, etc.
In China, Maxx's 24 hour rule is not really possible to observe when you are spending every sleeping and waking minute with someone, but his other rule, different culture, different customs, you certainly can observe. I can give a couple of examples of when I kept this rule in my mind: 1. Litter - many people, including my wife, are happy to throw litter on the ground - this never failed to annoy me. Even in a beautiful natural place like Zhangjiajie, people were happy to throw their plastic waste on the floor, despite the bins everywhere and the signs asking them to respect the environment. My reaction - well I said nothing, just made a point of putting all my rubbish in the bins. By the end of my stay, my wife started to do the same. 2. Queuing and pushing - people make jokes about English people that they love to queue, but in China, every bus queue is a scrum and a free-for-all. It's survival of the fittest. I can't count the amount of times we stood around fairly purposelessly, then suddenly, a bunch of men started knocking old women and children down in order to get their precious seat on the bus. In England it is just common courtesy to give up your seat to pregnant women and old people.
So I found it difficult to get used to these customs, but rather than jump in and express my disapproval, I made a point of giving up my seat (when I could). My wife gave me some funny looks, but I was happy to explain why I did what I did.
Having an extra week with my wife (courtesy of the volcano) was fantastic. A week to do ordinary stuff. Last time I visited, she was touchingly scared by a cheap horror attraction. This time she was terrified by Jurassic Park on the TV, and traumatised by Alice in Wonderland in 3D. My shoulders still hurt from the amount of times she dug her nails into my skin. Ha ha. Walking through Changsha, strolling along the riverbank, watching the guys play Mah Jongg or cards, eating stinky tofu, watching some Chinese street theatre, playing badminton, visiting her friends, sitting in a park chatting using our Besta translator, eating a cheap meal in a different restaurant each day. I loved it all.
