You might be an expat living in Xining if…*

• You woke at 7 a.m. on a Saturday to the sounds of loud firecrackers outside your window.
• The local Coffee Bar you visited recently doesn’t actually serve any coffee.
• At least half your small talk is focused around what type of visa you (or your friends) are currently on or hypothetically could be on in the immediate future.
• You buy fresh milk (poured into a plastic bag) on the street corner from a lady who refers to you as Young Master (= xiao kai).
• You watch the NBA playoff games, mid-morning, with Chinese commentary.  (I’d take spotty phrases of Mandarin over Bill Walton’s drivel any day.)
• When ordering meals in a restaurant you must specify that you *don’t want* chili peppers added.  Doing so ensures that the food will only be "medium" as opposed to "volcanic" on the spicy scale.
• You’ve been approached in the last two minutes by a local citizen to answer the question of whether or not your two daughters are twins.  (No, they aren’t, but all us whiteys look alike…)
• No matter how badly you’ve butchered the language (or not spoken the language at all) a local tells you how good your Chinese is.
• Your local 7-11 sells a product labeled in English as "Toilet Water".  (As we were laughing at this a man came in and bought a bottle.)
• You drank a hot soft drink (Pepsi, Sprite) in the last week without grimacing.
• You have unconsciously begun to adapt British English into your vernacular.  (That’s just rubbish.  Yes, we got it sorted.)
• You’ve used Skype more in than last week than you’ve used your home phone.
• You were amazed to witness workers actually trimming GREEN shrubs on the roadside.  The fact that there was real foliage that had actually grown more than desired is amazing on many levels in this dusty, dry environment.

* = a U.S. Expat specifically, but many of these will apply to other nationalities as well.