In with the New
New Goals and Aspirations for 2021.
2020 ended well for me, with a positive result from my six month review at work and us moving into a more modern, more spacious apartment in a slightly different part of town.
The move was driven by negative factors: primarily a recurrence of the toilet issues that we discovered shortly after moving in, but also obliviously inconsiderate new neighbours who, had I ever seen them loitering near the communal staircase in our building, would have really tested the limits of my self-restraint.
While I was fairly attached to our old apartment it hasn’t taken me long at all to fall in love with our new one. Everything inside is a subtle upgrade that on its own isn’t obvious but adds up to a much nicer place to live. From the stronger heat lamps in the bathroom, to the softer mattress and larger bed, to the gas (rather than electric) stove and the heater mode on the air-conditioning, there’s a lot of little modern touches that make life here so much more comfortable.
Other advantages took a few days to discover. Such as the abundance of vegetable markets nearby and the fact that the restaurants here cater to a broader range of tastes and budgets than the up-market, western-style eateries around Nanjing West Rd.
So the area is more amenable to middle-of-the-road xiaokang consumers like us. But my favourite feature of all is one that’s free for everybody to use, and it’s called the Greenway.
The Greenway is a running track that mostly follows the southern bank of Suzhou Creek and stretches on for miles. Exactly how many miles I’m not sure just yet. It ends about 5km from our apartment if I head east, but running west the other day on a recovery run, I made it a good 9km before turning round and the path at that point showed no signs of being near its end.
Our apartment is literally 5 minutes walk from the creek and the view along the Greenway is beautiful for the majority of its stretch. As someone who really started getting into running towards the end of my time in Fuzhou, it’s nice to finally have somewhere in busy and built-up Shanghai where I can get back into that flow and blow off some steam in my down time.
It should also nicely facilitate my main goal for 2021, which is to run my first ever marathon. I’ll go into that in more detail in a separate post. For now I’ll just say that I have three goals this year: run a marathon (the Shanghai marathon if all things align), pass one of my two bi-yearly work reviews, and sort out my woeful Vietnamese, towards which I made far less progress than I wanted during 2020.
Oh, I almost forgot, there’s a fourth goal: to increase our family membership by somewhere in the region of 50%. I guess that counts as a goal, just one that’s a little harder to schedule and control for than the other three. Anyway, fingers crossed.
