spoiled

since being the US for a couple of weeks, i've been thinking about things i appreciate about living in china.  the cost of living in china is amazing, and there are several things that i can do there that i would never be able to do if i was living in the US (some based on cost of living and some not).

• not owning a car
• this is a huge one for me!  it's such a relief for me to not have the responsibility of owning a car. i don't have to think about oil changes or what to do if something on my car breaks or paying for car insurance, because i don't have a car, and i don't even need to have a car!  i can take a bus or taxi or ride a bike or walk anywhere i need to go easily.  this is freeing to me.  in the US i feel trapped--either because i don't have a car and therefore can't really go anywhere at all, or because i own a car and feel weighed down by all the things you have to think about if you own a car.
• hiring a driver
• if i need to go somewhere a long distance at an inconvenient time for taking a bus or the train (usually if i have to go to the airport really early in the morning or come back from the airport really late at night), no problem, because i can hire a driver, and though it is definitely less cost efficient than taking a train or bus, i can afford it.  who has a driver they can ask to drive them places if they need to go somewhere??  crazy.
• having someone clean my house
• this is incredibly amazing.  especially when work is super busy, it's so great to not worry about how messy my house is getting, because once a week someone comes and cleans it.  i still can't believe sometimes that i have this!  i even feel kind of guilty about it.  can't i clean my own house??  hmm.  actually reflecting on that might be another post all together.
• traveling whenever i feel like it
• this is within reason of course.  if i traveled during every vacation to whatever destination i felt like, i definitely would have no money left.  but if i want to go somewhere, it's within my means to do that, especially if the destination is within china or within asia.  it's usually significantly cheaper to travel within asia from china than it is to travel to the US or to europe or something like that.  japan is close and easy to go to (yay!) and maybe i can travel to singapore sometime or something like that!  but i've also been able to go to romania and nepal since living in china.
• owning a cello and having cello lessons
• this year i bought a cello.  a cheap one, yes, but it is a cello.  i don't think i ever would have thought that was even possible if i wasn't living in china.  unless i had some amazingly well paying job.  it would have seemed like such a huge thing to spend money on.  not to mention lessons as well.  you can't just buy a cello and that not actually learn how to play it!

just listing all these things makes me feel really spoiled.  i definitely make less money than i would if i had a teaching job in the US, even including what my company pays for my apartment, but the money goes so much further in china!  maybe i can finish paying off my college loans in the next year!  we'll see.