A More Difficult Life

Moving to our current home has reminded me how difficult life in China can be. We no longer have a driver, and we no longer live inside a complex. This means that a crazy number of things are now difficult:

If my children are going with me, I must be going somewhere within walking distance.
I can walk to the Metro, but they have no elevators and our local escalator is broken - not so stroller friendly.
I can only walk to the grocery by taking the Metro.
I am a 10-20 minute walk from the nearest playground.
The public bathroom nearby are all smelly, filthy and quite frequently used.
The stuff they sell on the street can be nauseating - live bull frogs, dead chickens, glazed duck heads.
People spit, pee, ride their bikes and their motorbikes on the already crowded sidewalks.
I can not communicate with any of my neighbors.
People have again begun touching our kids - grabbing their hair, speaking to them like pet dogs.
The neighborhood is under ridiculous amounts of construction - such that I often feel that breathing is an unsafe choice.

The change in school has made a change in our lives as well.
Sophia now attends school 3 mornings a week - giving me 3 mornings a week to get my errands run.
School is now only 3 hours rather than 5 - giving me only 9 hours a week to get my errands run.
This school makes no move to foster community. The girls have made friends, but I have not.

Bugs!
I live in constant fear of monster cockroaches, keeping everything fully sealed and taking out the garbage like a maniac. I never leave a door open for more than a few seconds, and have only recently been persuaded to use the screen doors.
We constantly swat at flies, mosquitos and sewer flies. Because although the pest control service seems to have scared them away from the interior of the house, they still seem to congregate around the front door.
I see rats in my neighborhood, and live in terror that one of these monsters will one day show up under my kitchen table.