In fact, the only reason why I'm posting right now is because I'm procrastinating my systematic breakdown of each room in our old apartment. Here's a shot of the one room I've finished (via Instagram):
Moving always calls for a bit of introspection. Marilyn and I have spent 2 1/2 years at this apartment, the majority of our time here in Beijing. It's been a great place for us, though, to be quite honest, it always felt kind of like a college dorm. A fact that was not helped by our proximity to most of Beijing's major universities, which meant we were surrounded by (mostly drunken) foreign students.
We're heading to the east side of town (Sanlitun for those of you keeping score at home) in order to be closer to M's work. We'll end up coming back to the Wudaokou/Zhongguancun area a few times a week to see friends, attend the international fellowship and for some random work projects that I'll have on that side of town, but when we did the math, we realized that we would save time, money and energy if we were based in Chaoyang. We're trying out the whole "commute to your friends, not your job" thing. Check back in with me in a few months and I'll let you know how it's going.
As troublesome as it is, moving's been good for us since it made us purge a lot of the extraneous junk we've accumulated over the past few years. Our new place is smaller so we couldn't just cart it over and dump it in a drawer again.
And it's helped us mark the time of our lives, bringing an era to a close for us. Gone are the days when M was "writing" her thesis and I was working 10-20 hours a week. Good times for sure, but our current lives somehow managed to be even better, even if we are working more (and harder) than we ever have before.
