I’m Christy, a girl who loves to tell stories, see new places and experience things first hand. I live in jeans and comfy sweaters and have a thing for wool socks. I’m also a sucker for a good beverage and some local street food. While I’ve lived in various places around Europe and Asia, I’ve recently relocated to Mexico and am learning to don more respectable footwear and differentiate between chilies while learning Spanish and soaking up the colors and cultures of this beautiful country. Shanghai will always be my home-away-from-home, as it’s where I found my “expat” footing and learned how to live abroad. In the last decade I haven’t managed to stay away for longer than ten months and while I hope to be fully present wherever I am, there’s a small piece of me that will always remain in China. I landed in Shanghai back in 2004 as part of a study-abroad group through my university. We came as a whole pack, professor included, so I’d say we had a pretty ‘soft landing’ in some ways; we weren’t left to figure everything out on our own and we had someone to walk us through what we were experiencing. But it was my first experience living overseas and without a doubt, I had a lot of adjustments to make on all levels. I loved it though—the chaos, the sights, sounds and even smells. Noodles for breakfast is my kind of paradise and as someone who’s drawn to vibrancy, the city offered an unlimited supply of it in the way of laundry hung from telephone lines and fresh produce stacked up along the sidewalk.