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It was already dark by the time I reached the local residential compound. All by myself, with nothing but luggage for three months of adventures, my eyes adjusted to nightfall before my mind did. My Couchsurfing host had sent me a beautifully handcrafted map to her residential compound via WeChat, the WhatsApp Plus of China. I walked right through the black metal gates, away from the street lights that had lightened my first days in this city, a chaotic maze of future and past. Eerie darkness, foreign mumbling in and dogs barking greeted me. I double-checked the house number on my phone and walked from one gray building to the next, as they stood side by side, identical and symmetrical. I looked for house numbers over and over again, but there were none to be found. Not one of the gray, dirty twin row houses revealed their face to me. I had had a couple of days to arrive in Shanghai, a labyrinth of diversity and uniformity with its clash of cultures, people, food and architecture. It had not felt easy to come here, but easier than I had expected, this being my second time out of Europe. I had started to wonder why I had expected it to be difficult to live here. Waiting for my rented room and running from the worst hostel that I have ever stayed in (but that is another story to tell), I had decided to give Couchsurfing a try and set out to this local area of the city that had little in common with H&M, McDonald's and Gap in the downtown area. My own cultural rules applied here even less, as small shops and large residential compounds, laundry flying from their windows, stood next to each other, connected by noise, dirt and characters that rarely revealed their meaning to me. The step through the gates of the compound had felt like the second step into another world, a darker, more quiet version of the liveliness and foreignness of the bustling local street life. By the time that I finally managed to contact my host, I felt completely lost, carrying my luggage almost like wearing a costume at a party that turned out to be a serious business meeting and everyone else got the notice. She calmly gave me directions to her house. To my surprise, I must have walked passed it at least five times. Still, I could not see any number indicating the address. It looked no different from any other building here, gray in gray. It was only once I almost entered that I noticed the lines next to the unlocked entrance door. Golden curves, partly symmetric, a pattern of wisdom on the gray walls. Like a magic spell cast to reveal unexpected beauty. Smiling to myself, I remembered what I had learned in one of my first Mandarin classes. Two strokes for two, two strokes for eight, four for six. Er ba liu. 二八六. 286. The numbers had been there all along. With my ignorance in assuming that all numbers in the world must look similar, I had simply not been able to see, yet alone to understand. "Up here", a friendly voice called me through a dirty gray hallway with a flickering lightbulb and broken pipes, that might as well have served as setting for a generic horror movie. Climbing up the stairs, I finally decided to leave my expectations behind me, step by step accepting the limitations of my own mind. After a weekend filled wih warm greetings, cozy homeliness, casting shows in Mandarin, English speaking improv comedy with Belgian beer, chicken feet from a shabby hub, green parks with old people dancing and fitness groups, jumping out of the way of bicycles and motorbikes on sidewalks, watching parents playing umbrella Tinder for their kids, and shopping amongst skyscrapers that looked like alien landing spaces, the golden characters still shine on in my mind to remind myself not to let myself be blinded by my expectations again.