Time Change

Adjusting to our new time zone happened fairly quickly for all of us, but now I am working on adjusting to the cultural differences in how time and schedules are kept. In Portugal it was a well known fact in our household that our German friends would always be right on time, and right on time to our Portuguese friends was 20-30 minutes late (or even more). Dan reported that was also normal in work situations. I seemed to adapt pretty fluently to the Portuguese schedule, though having two small children to get out of the house contributed significantly to our never actually being on time to anything. Here in China it seems to run in the opposite direction. If someone is scheduled to show up at our house at noon, they are always there by 11:45am. In addition to getting the kids ready we also are suffering from the phenomenon of it always taking twice as long to drive somewhere as it does to drive home. Hopefully that will change over time as our driver learns the location of the places that we generally want to go. Once Amelia actually starts school next week I will have an actual schedule to keep in the morning and we will need to get out the door on time, so I guess we better adjust to that time change as well. After 4.5 years of Portuguese time, I think that will be a harder than changing time zones.