Family Visitors!!

Who is next??

We had a great weekend with Sue, Jim, Drew and Ella.  They came to town on Thursday before Thanksgiving to spend a few days with us and then headed off on a heritage tour Sunday with other families who have adopted children from China.  For those that don't know, our niece Ella was adopted about four years ago.  I don't know all the details but the children and families are somehow invited to come back to China to see where they were born.  (Maybe Sue can read this when she gets back to the states and set the record straight.)  
We showed them a bit of ordinary life here in Beijing......or our life anyway.  Our local veggie man, a Chinese grocery, a nice Chinese restaurant;  where we ordered a fish dish and a few minutes after placing our order a guy walks over to our table with a live fish in a bucket to be sure it was OK for our meal....you don't see that every day in the US.  Mike took them to a shopping center/mall...these are hard to explain exactly but Mike took them there specifically for Ella to get her nails done:)  I took Sue and Jim to Pan Jia Yuan so they could look for treasures to take home.  It was a cold day for the Californians!!   We had tea in a little cafe, very interesting looking tea....
Drew made good headway in learning how to ride a bike.....now you might think he would already know how but he sort of bypassed two wheels for one.  He is a unicycler, one wheel is all he requires to get around.  He needed to learn to be able to take the bike ride on the great wall later in the week with the tour.  
We also took them on a tour of Olivia's school.  It was even a tour for Mike as he saw parts of the school he had never seen before.  I have spent much more time at WAB than Mike so I know my way around pretty well.  They thought it was pretty neat especially the Koi stream in the High School.  We even got to see Olivia on her lunch break sitting in her favorite chair and we met some of her friends.  
It was fun to see family here on this side of the world.  Come on over for a visit, we have plenty of space!  

Olivia celebrating her birthday with her cousin.  One turning 17, one turning 6.....guess who is who!!

The atrium in Olivia's school.  Also showing the amphitheater.  The school also has two other theaters/stages in the elementary building. 

Looking down from the top of the ramp to the giant red Chinese chairs.  If you look closely on the left you can see some koi in the koi stream, and yes, some people have stepped right into it, I almost did one day.  The chairs up at the left are where I can usually find Olivia at lunch time.....how is this for a high school cafeteria?

The weird looking tea.  Very welcome on a cold morning at the market.



It is very hard to load pictures with a VPN that keeps shutting down:(  
My Aunt said she was going through withdrawal as I have not been posting....I am trying:)

Love, fondly, sincerely,
zaijian,
Ramona

It is a small world!!!

Thanksgiving  in Beijing, China. 

My friend loves to celebrate Thanksgiving.  They have a tradition here to have each member of the family invite a family to dinner….rules apply…..should not be American and cannot be invited a second time.  Fairly easy to accomplish as the international community here is huge and varied as well as being transient.  Thanksgiving being a regular work day here, my friend had her dinner last weekend.  So this year at their dinner conversation was learning about each other.  One gentleman said he worked on MR systems.  My friend mentions me and says my husband works on MR for GE.  He asks the name and says I know him……!!!  So here we are in Beijing and this guy used to work at GE Global Research in Schenectady on MR’s while we were in South Carolina the first time.  He left GE to work with another company here in China and just moved to Beijing last year.  It’s a small world!!  And he is not American, he is Dutch.

Love, fondly, sincerely,

Zaijian,

Ramona

Squash and pumpkin excursion

I never really know where I am going.  

Having a driver or riding in the car with someone else's driver does not lead one to learn exactly where things are.  Consequently I don't know where this place is.  It is a road with roadside markets somewhere outside the 6th ring.  If you look at a map of Beijing you will see that there are roads running in circles around the center of the city.  No they don’t actually run…they are thereJ  Due to congestion and pollution there are days when you cannot drive your car inside 5^th Ring Road.  This is based on the last digits of your license plate.  Currently our day is Monday; I believe your day changes quarterly.  Lucky for Mike our driver lives outside the 5^th ring on the east south side of Beijing and we live outside the 5^th ring on the east north side and work is somewhere back on the east south side.  (Just giving directions the way it is done here.)  On the day your car cannot go into the city you either take a taxi or shuttle or subway.  Mike never has to do that, very lucky guy.  

I am having a great deal of difficulty with the VPN so a quick bit of wording before all is lost!

Looking along the road showing the pumpkins and apples as far as you can see.

Just huge piles!  So colorful.

Not a lot of variety of apples, just plenty of them.

An interesting looking tractor type thing, for lack of a better description.  At first I thought it was a rototiller but here it is being used to haul the wagon load to the stand.  Perhaps it is a rototiller in the spring and the tines are removable.

Some funky varieties of squash.












A huge pile of the type we bought for our 'pumpkin'.

Some of the ones I bought.

Sparkles approved!!


Love, fondly, sincerely,
zaijian,
Ramona

What should you do when the weather is nasty?

Heat up the kitchen!! 

I have not yet shown you the pictures from buying apples and squash......don't rush me:)

But I will show you what we did today while it was windy and nasty outside.

 Mike helping with another batch of applesauce.

 I have no idea what these are called.  My friend bought some and cooked one up and made pumpkin muffins using it.  They disappeared in mere moments.
We were looking for a 'pumpkin' source  because a  can of Libby's pumpkin here is 22.50 rmb, almost 4 dollars.  At the rate we both use canned pumpkin for bread, pies and muffins that was a bit much to pay.  For 21 kuai (rmb) I got enough of these squash to make a million muffins.  So far I have cooked up three and have more than 7 cans worth in the freezer.  These four have yet to be cooked.  She had also gotten some different types of pumpkins for decorations and possible cooking.  The problem with pumpkins and squash is you never know how they will cook down.  The one she tried worked so we went back to the place together and bought a bunch.

For a size perspective, Sparkles was playing squash!

That is what you do when the weather is nasty!

Or at least I do:)

Love, fondly, sincerely,

zaijian,

Ramona                                                                            

The weather in China

They say it doesn't snow in Beijing.
So what then it this white stuff we woke up to today?  And what is the stuff that was flying around in the air about 3:00 this afternoon?  We call it snow where I grew up!

 Out our front gate at 6:30 AM.

 Off the back side of the house, second floor balcony.

Out the front balcony window, the light fixture on our wall.  We call that snow:)

From the third floor window into the back yard.  That thing on the right is our barbecue.

This is about three inches of water on the second floor balcony.  It is sitting there because the willow leaves have blocked the drain pipe.  It is cold water, very cold water...see the snow around the edge of the railing base?   Also blobs of snow kept falling off the roof into this water.  These houses leak where ever they can so I was a bit worried that if the water sat there too long it would start to seep in.....I had to go out there with the broom and use the handle to clear out the drain pipe........That is how I know it is cold, cold, cold water, I do not own rubber boots.

And these beautiful roses are what I picked from my yard three days ago.





Love, fondly, sincerely,
zaijian,
Ramona

Applesauce in China

My family likes homemade applesauce, 
I do not.  However, because I love them I make it for them every fall.  I wasn't sure that would happen here.  I didn't know if I could get a type of apple that would cook down and get it in quantity.  I have met the right people and they know where to get the right apples, yahoo!  There will be another post about that excursion.  Here we have the applesauce process.  Mike actually taught me how to make it, I never made it before we married because, as I said, I don't eat it.

 Washing the apples, I actually used a bit of soap as they seemed much dirtier than what we get back home.  These apples are pretty tiny.  Not looking forward to peeling them for an apple pie.

 All cut up and into the pot they go.  They turned brown faster than any apple I ever used before.  And don't ask what kind they are because I can't translate the name, neither could my friend.

 Getting mushy, a good thing for applesauce.  Smmokin' hot!!

 Into the food mill, a very useful item I might add.
I only made a small pot because they are connoisseurs of applesauce and I didn't want a whole lot of stuff that no one would eat.

 These apples are rather dry, once they were put through the mill I only had to heat them to cook in the sugar and cinnamon, no cooking down needed.

The sauce passed muster.  They both enjoyed eating it.  Not the normal pink they are used to........hey, I found apples!!!






Love, fondly, sincerely,
zaijian,
Ramona

Swimming

First swim meet this week.
There are many international schools here in Beijing and all around Asia.  Western Academy of Beijing being one of them.  There are many organizations to which these schools belong which allows them to compete all over the place.  Olivia was supposed to go to Hanoi for a competition but there were issues so the team didn't go....:(  However there are more local meets and she should be going to Phuket in the spring.   These are just a few shots of the meet.
We didn't remember the good camera so the shots aren't so hot.....documentation of the event is the name of the game!

Mounting the starting block.

Practice before the meet.

 COLD!

Love, fondly, sincerely,

zaijian,

Ramona