One of the things I missed most about home while we were in china was the clean air, the clean streets, not breathing in dirt, and distinct *lack* of pollution we have here compared to the industrial cities you visit there. When we arrived in Shanghai, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. And we didn’t see a cloud until we were once again on a plane, high above the cities and their coal/industrial smog clouds, and not again for a week after that…once we hit hong kong.

It’s environment week here in Canada. And ironically, it comes not too long after the new conservative Canadian governement has axed most of the environmental programs. The one tonne challenge (you all remember the rick mercer ads, yes?)? Not conservative enough! It’s gotta go – apparently to be replaced by a more “Canadian” solution. Um…a program developed by canadians for canadians isn’t canadian enough? Uh oh. Which means that our “environmental programs” now have the potential to look like this garabage can from the streets of Beijing:

While our crafty canadian climate change team tries to think of something, er…Canadian-ish…you might want to busy yourself with checking out Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, a “documentary” about Climate Change, and why we should care about it, which opens at the Bytowne this weekend.

of course you guys have already figured out that I’m back. I think I’m just starting to figure it out too.

Going away to another country and a completely different culture for a long time is *hard*. It’s delightful to be there and our trip was incredible. But coming back is weird. You’re not used to clean air, or people being polite. You have to learn how to be a pedestrian again, not to mention figuring out how roads work here. Being able to order off a menu without having to use handsigns and lots of pointing is amazing. Not getting pushed around is so foreign you start to get upset that people are being nice.

China was, in many ways, a completely different world. But in other ways, it was comfortable and easy to figure it out.

I’m going to be posting some of my china stories and photos over the next few days – stay tuned. But in the meantime, I’m busy again – it took all of 30 seconds after getting off of the plane, I think.

This weekend we went to a wedding, I stressed about product packaging, had nightmares about production for ladyfest which is in less than two weeks (can you say ACK??) and the arrival of some new stuff that I’ll be working on for that show. We played with kitties, briefly toured art in the park, and drooled over dairy products (there is no cheese in china and I have to say we missed it terribly).