The big annoyances of China have made me forget the niggly annoyances of my home country, that's for sure.
But, people can be interesting in my country. Not necessarily friendly, but worth getting to know. And they can be helpful and intelligent; worth listening to.

What I probably romanticize the most, is depth of character. My country has people posting selfies and food pics on FaceBook, 'sent from my iPhone', while they watch reality shows or singing/dancing/performance contests. There is some spitting, shouting and boorish behaviour too.

And the streets can be dangerous at night...

Sure I do. 'Home' aka the 'West' is just such an abstract remembrance of mine. like a few others on this board (is this a 'board'?) I have lived away from 'home' for so long now that it is just a ...... memory. And , yeah, that memory is comprised mostly of the good stuff I lived thru whilst living in the West (in my case mostly America).

my rational mind reminds me that it is just a place, with good and bad things about it,,, but I tend to remember and focus on the good parts.

ok,,, for balance I will list 3 things bad about where I lived, spent time in the US in the 80's 90's.

1. seemed there was a 'drug culture' amongst my peers. *why do/did relatively affluent white kids turn to drugs?? weird...

2. a bit of the old working your life away, but not really ever knowing what for. sure, had a nice house and a nice car, but still seemed a fair amount of angst over where Life was taking us.

3. ok, can only think of those 2~

I am asked all the time about when I will go back to the USA. My answer is that I do not know. It is not that I hate my country. On the contrary. i love America. I am not exactly happy with the direction that some agendas and social issues are headed. But, if it was not thises things, I would find something else I did not like about America.

My thinking is this. At my age, I have spent enough time in America to have seen and do the things I wanted there. Since leaving America, I have discovered that the world is a much more interesting place that needs to be explored with the time I have left on this planet. I will stay in China for a few more years, trying to see all the worthwhile things to me. Then, off ot perhaps another asian country to work for a couple of years and explore. I would like to get to Europe sometime for a few years. And, eventually, I see myself retiring in South America, exploring those countries.

I like doing comparison charts to help my dtough decision making. I made one recently about my staying in China or leaving. The positives outweighed the negatives for me. Perhaps, once the negatives outweigh the positives, it is time to leave. Notice I used the word "outweigh" versus "outnumbered". I believe in using a comparison chart you should focus on weight of issues more than just the number of items in each column. Just a little help if you try to do a comparison chart in the future.

I thought about this a lot before I decided to plan to leave China and... nope.

I still remember what pisses me off about home and in a lot of ways China is a better place to live.

I was a bit worried that I was romanticized home, before being back home. It was one of the thing that held me back for a while, actually. What if my whining about life in China are just me and ridiculous expectation ?

Now, I'm back home, and went through the whole relocation process.

What turned out to be my imagination

* Administration is slooooowwww (budget cuts, understaffed)

* Housing market is not as rosy as expected : renting a home with a garden is a thing of the past, people buy those things, they don't rent them. It's specific to my current area.
* Laoganma sauce is 4x the price it is in China.

And that's it, after close to 2 months..