I’ve been hemming and hawing about this blog for several months as we’ve prepared to return to China. It exists, still, five years later, but what to do with it?

Engage at all? Abandon it completely? Use it as a repository for dumping new China photos? Start a new site?

I drafted a post the other day. Then quit. My heart’s not in it.

I don’t have time, patience, to think this through or to be clever. I do, however, want a record of our return, of this time in China. And so this is where I think I will go with it. Mostly snapshots, as notes. A simple record. Less chatter.

Art has been here for a full month, settling in and starting his semester (he’s teaching two courses to graduate students: the American Political Process, and the US Constitution). Elle and I arrived five days ago, and remain, STILL, leaden with jet lag: sleeping when we should sleep now, and waking when we should wake just fine, but otherwise really out of kilter. Maybe it’s the lack of bright sunlight more than simply jet lag?

First feelings upon our return? As I’ve said in response to everything for the last decade of my life: everything is different, but nothing ever changes. We’d been here, in Chengdu, in 2011 for a short visit with the Jacobs and packed a lot into two days. A morning with the pandas, a stroll on the tourist-y Jinli Street, a visit to  Wuhou Shrine on a misty April tomb sweeping day. Our first Sichuan hot pot, the Bookworm, and Pete’s Tex Mex. We’d even been inside their apartment, the one just below where I am sitting right now, in the Foreign Experts Building on campus. We knew what we were getting into when we said yes to a Chengdu Fulbright assignment. This city of more than 14 million (roughly equivalent to the combined populations of NYC and LA) is quieter than Beijing, softer somehow, much more willing to relax. No hurry. No worry. The people are kind. Helpful. It’s not a particularly sunny place though, and that is seriously jarring to those of us, to me, at least, coming from southern California. The daytime light is filtered, gauzy. Monochrome. Like old concrete. Like Pittsburgh, frequently, in winter. The air itself is thick though I can’t say if that’s air pollution or a pressure system bearing down. The taxis green. The local flavor tongue numbing chili pepper. Rows of dusty bicycles that do not appear to have been ridden in years, their tires dry rotting. Or maybe they’re fine. Rows of trees with their trunks painted white. Uneven, unforgiving tile sidewalks that make my legs ache. The Sichuan University campus older, much more vast, than Renmin U; so vast there are rickshaws waiting inside each gate, available to cart you to your destination on campus for 4 RMB (single) or 6 (two people). It’s an orderly campus, very tidy, astonishingly quiet, and a little mysterious. Until you find the sports courts, filled with college students in rowdy pick up games, and then the mysteriousness disappears. And just outside the campus gates-or within a short taxi ride-are H&M, Subway, Walmart, Lenscrafters. Adidas. Ikea. A store with what appears to be licensed MLB wear including green (?) Yankees caps. Wifi is everywhere. And plentiful.

As we exited the airport last week into Chengdu’s night air… a familiar, exotic, tangy whiff: Yep, smells like China. It really does. Elle and I have the same thought at the same instant. A pungency we remember. It permeates us. Within a few days we no longer notice it.

Some very random first glimpses. The Tibetan Quarter, Wuhou Shrine, Jinli Street.