China #4

Hello and welcome to China letter #4,
 
We have this VPN (Virtual Private Network) now, currently it is on a trial basis but Mike says we will get it.  It is the only way I will be able to blog from China, or do Facebook or look at any of my favorite blogs (Quiltville, Shakti Dove:) and some others.  The great 'Fire Wall of China' is very strong.....I can't look at video clips anyone emails  me and stuff like that.  I also don't  seem to be able to access my email when I have the VPN on.......things we have to work around/through......I may end up using another email provider if I can't get it to work but it isn't a huge issue so it can ride.

Today is a 350 on the air quality index, almost to hazardous!  I have to take some pictures of good and bad days (got the bad) out the window for comparison and as soon as I can do it post them here.....Olivia says she will help her old mother learn the posting process.
It doesn't feel like I live in a huge city because we have trees and green out the front and back windows of the house.  The government does a good job of beautifying the city.  Flowers and trees are planted everywhere....there are even flower boxes on the railings of some of the expressways full of begonias, marigolds and flowers I don't know.  Not sure how they water them but they must!  All sorts of trees, roses everywhere too.  Dust everywhere too!

I hired an Ayi this week.  She comes in five days a week for 4 hours.  She has very limited English but we are able to communicate.  She cleans, does laundry and yesterday we walked to the market together and the vegetable shop.  Many of the veggies are the same, just maybe a different variety and they seem to cost less than in the states.  Of course there are many unfamiliar fruits and veggies too.  We got a huge bag of veggies at the shop for about $7.00 US.  I don't think I could have gotten that at home.  Having help here is the norm....my main concern was to have someone in place when we travel......in SC we had friends come feed the kitties....here all our friends will travel when we travel as they want to get out of town when they can too.  Everyone I spoke with said it would be hard to find an Ayi who would come just to feed the cats and not work for us.   I may change her hours as I don't think I can keep her busy all the time......time will tell.

Olivia has tried out for swim team.and will begin practicing on Monday.....oh yea, practice is at 6:45 am three mornings and 7:00am on Saturdays.  Really looking forward to making sure our teenager is up and on the go that early.  At least they provide a bus, otherwise she would have to head out 30 minutes earlier to walk there. 

We have restarted our Chinese lessons this week.  A woman comes to our house two evenings a week for two hours.  Since we haven't worked on it much since June we are almost at square one:(  She is also having us work on learning characters.....so challenging, the hope is we will be able to recognize some basic words as time goes on.  Our Ayi is also helping me and I teach her some English.  Basic stuff related to house and home, food, etc.

We have found our fourth bihou lizard in the house.  This one still lives here as Olivia was not able to catch it.  They have all been babies, we don't know how they get in.  Olivia takes them out to the tree in the back yard.  I haven't been able to find out much about them, they appear to be a variety of Gecko.

Enough for now,
Zaijian