Grind

The daily struggle to survive in a foreign country is often greater than the struggle to survive at home for a number of reasons; different language, different food, different cultural norms. I however, have encountered a different type of struggle that is wearing me down - my job has odd hours.

Beginning with my 8am alarm to make my 9am Chinese lesson and returning home around 10pm, my days often last over 14 hours before I can relax. Even when I can relax at night, I'll need to go to sleep within an hour or two of getting home, or I won't have enough energy to make it through the next day. I've discovered everyone needs 1 more hour of sleep than normal while in China (I blame the pollution for causing our bodies to slow down so much). This leaves me with almost no time to do things I enjoy on a daily basis, and my weekends are often spent catching up on sleep! It's not a life!

The sad solution is to skip my Chinese lessons in the morning, which I have been doing more and more often. I'm beginning to realize I likely won't ever become fluent and that certainly is a knock on the motivation to run my body ragged trying to learn. If I sleep in, I can have a relaxing morning, eat breakfast, and read a little bit before showing up to work at about 12:30. That's a bid difference than 9am, and I don't get to go home until my last class finishes at 9:30 either way.

I'm still learning to balance learning Chinese and having a life. It's not easy, I'd like to go to Chinese more, but in the past week I've only been once. The real problem is I need to devote even more time outside the classroom to learning, which is time I don't really have much of. Hopefully my upcoming trip to Qingdao will help me - 5 days in a beach resort town home to the most famous beer brewery in all of China. If I can't relax after that, I'm afraid there is no peace to be found anywhere in China.