Life-updates from Shanghai

Blog – July 3 (day 338)

Ooeeff, a little longer than 4 months (112 days to be exact) since I last wrote a story. I apologize deeply to the people waiting and asking for it ;) Again: where to start, where to start..

I must admit I wasn’t counting days anymore. I now feel more like this adventure is the beginning of the rest of my life, instead of some very temporary trip. If I’m gonna stay here for a long time, if I will be living in another place for a while, if I’ll go travel to many other places. If I’m gonna be an English teacher for all that time, if I’m gonna do something completely different.. Only time can tell :)

Whatever it will be, I’m determined to make the best out of it and just enjoy as much as I can.

The last few months haven’t always been easy, I encountered some homesickness and frustrations. As I came to realize after my last blog: Life here is not different from life anywhere else. In the way of: you go to work, you go out with friends, you spend some time alone, you have your good days and your bad, your schedule is sometimes way too tight, you get sick and tired every now and then and one day you’ll feel good again. The big difference is that Shanghai is ever-changing and offers so so so many things to do and visit and explore.

Not to forget, the fact that I live here made possible for me to:

- Spend a weekend on the heavenly beaches of Koh Samed (a very cute Thai island where – so I found out later - I’ve already been before) with Jon (with whom I fell in love with soon after my last post ;)). The very good weather, sea, delicious food, Thai massages and very nice people made me feel like I had entered paradise ^^ Supershufu!

- Explore Japan for 5 days. Jon and me went to visit Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo. This experience actually deserves it’s own blogpost ;)

- Go to Hangzhou and Longying tea village for 3 days and submerge myself into the Chinese nature a bit.

- Learn Chinese. Still on it. Progress is slowly but I’m enjoying most of the time :)

August 18 (384th day of my trip)

Alright, I somehow got stuck on my post last time. Because it’s SUCH a long time ago I updated you guys last, I honestly didn’t know what to write. But for now I’ll accept that there will be a lot of my experiences missing in this blogpost. Maybe they’ll be posted some other day J

As life too is ever-changing, here are some of the most important life-updates for now:

♥ I’m still happily organizing some of the weekly Comfort Zone Crushers meetings :)

♥ Got a visitor: Nena came to see me in Shanghai. Had two amazing weeks :D

♥ I sort of stopped studying Chinese, because

♥ Jon and me decided to maybe leave Shanghai somewhere next year to go travel around Asia together! That’s why

♥ I’m working 2 other jobs now next to my English teaching-job. I’m also translation medical documents from English to Dutch and I’m learning about website-building. This is both to save some money, and to develop some kind of digital nomad life (although this term is not perfect, it best covers my endeavour to create a life where I’m able to travel around and still make some money from anywhere in the world ^^).

♥ How awesome would that be?! I’m excited about the future!

♥ For 2018, so far some of the places on our list are: Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Philippines. And it’s growing.. Don’t worry! I’ll definitely step by home before then. And since my hopefully new flexible lifestyle I’ll be able to step by more often too!!

♥ YESSS mom and Ramon will come visit me in November ^^

♥ One last thing: Since I’m experimenting with website-building, I created my own: http://www.nikkisfootprint.com. It’s tiny now, with just one post and an ‘about-me’ page, (like the moestuintjes mom sent me and which I planted here in Shanghai), but we all know that all of the good stuff you spend time and effort on will eventually grow into something beautiful :D

For any questions, email me ;)