Outside the Pandemic, Mostly

June 12 marked the one year anniversary of this odd chapter in our lives of living in a whole other country from the one we used to live in. Gotta say, this is not exactly where I expected to be a year in. Honestly I’m not sure what I expected, but here’s what the reality is: on the one year anniversary, I spent my afternoon at our middle school’s graduation ceremony, which was fairly normal. The chairs were socially distanced and most people wore masks, which was not the case at the high school’s graduation the night before. Middle school graduation involved a couple of speeches, mostly in Chinese, and also a lot of photos and a lot of awards and a little bit of singing and bowing and a lot of awards and a slide show with a lot of giggling so it was basically your standard graduation. The high school one was almost twice as long and involved some kind of skit that I think was a metaphor for drugs that served as the transitions between photo slideshows of all the classes’ memorable moments. It also had longer speeches. <a href="https://medium.com/@GrahamMOliver/outside-the-pandemic-mostly-820779cae69a">Website</a>