Goodbye, Beijing ... my time is up, and I must fare thee well

Three years is a long time. Or, three years isn't a long time. It all depends how you look at it, really.

When I first arrived in China, I had no idea how long my stay here would be. All my wife and I really knew was just how different everything seemed from the previous lives we'd led in the Middle East and the United Kingdom.

It took some time for us to adjust, as it almost always does in such circumstances, but eventually we found our groove and settled into our new lives here in Beijing, or the "Northern Capital".