Travel log Date: 12/16/12

America Here we Come!

We are just starting out and very awake here in Beijing.  Flight leaves at 5:00 pm Beijing time.

That is 4:00 am EST.  You guys are nestled all snug in your beds!

A sign we are in the right place!!

A little store in Newark.

Here we are on our last leg....of the journey, or our last leg......we just had a 13 hour flight and a two hour layover where we had to collect our bags go through customs and immigration and recheck our bags,  Go through security again...much slower than China.... then find our gate only to find our flight was delayed!  Poor Mom and Dad had to sit in Albany airport an extra hour waiting for us.  Thanks Mom and Dad:) 
We are still smiling!!  It is 10:00 pm EST.

Love, fondly, sincerely,

Zaijian,

Ramona

My Christmas present

I picked out an early Christmas present:)

Olivia's school holds a Charity bazaar every fall the weekend of Thanksgiving in America.  I am on the charity link at school so I helped out with setting up the school stores which were open that day and with selling apples to support an orphanage, as well as setting up the gym for the vendors who rented tables at the bazaar.  They have many vendors of all sorts of things.  When I got time to go and see, the first table as you went in the door was a  woman  selling wooden nativity sets and other Christian items.  I have always wanted a wooden nativity and these were absolutely beautiful!  I went to ask the price on the largest one and realized the woman was from our church.  It turns out her family makes these from Camphor wood.  I wanted to share it with you all, I absolutely love it!  I only wish I could get one for every one.

The neatest thing about it is the people are Chinese.  Mary and Joseph have topknots.  Look closely at the angel too.  

Wisemen, Shepherds, sheep, camels, an ox, donkey and three very different trees.  





Love, fondly,sincerely,
Zaijian,
Ramona 

She is still playing!

All those flute lessons have paid off!
On the 29th the school held their Band Winter Showcase.   Olivia is in the Concert Band at WAB.  She is second chair flute out of at least 8 flutes.  The girl who is 1st chair is majoring in music.......hard to beat that.  The head of the music department  and director of the bands told me he loves the way she sits up so straight and never slouches when she is playing, always holding her flute high and even.  She owes that to having a fantastic teacher in South Carolina.  Ms. Kristin was really a stickler for appearance while playing and looking professional, the lessons took:)

 A friend took these pictures for us as I forgot to bring the camera.......I always forget the camera:(

Love, fondly, sincerely,
zaijian,
Ramona

My eyes are bigger than the backpack

It is getting mighty cold here in Beijing!

I am finding it a bit chilly riding the bike these days.  The wind just bites right into me, both the one nature provides and the one created by my moving fast through the atmosphere.  So this evening I walked to the market instead of riding.  I was only going for one item.....you know how that is.  I can send Mike to the store for one item and he comes home with exactly that one thing.......I am incapable of doing that because I know what is getting low or what I might want to make for dinner in a day or two.  So, on this excursion I was supposed to get yogurt for Mike's lunch.  I got carried away.......
This is me on a return from the store minus the flip-flops   You do not wear your shoes in the house here, too much nastiness on the roads and sidewalks.  Our high today was 36 degrees according to weather.com.  I don't know that it got that high as there is a leaky faucet on the side of the house and the icicles did not diminish in size during the day.  (Said leaky faucet has now been repaired by compound maintenance.)  (Notice the towel at the bottom of the door?  3/8ths inch gap has not been dealt with by said compound maintenance.)

Now that backpack doesn't look like much but it has a pretty good capacity.  I am holding a carton of eggs I decided not to squish on the way home.

However, all this stuff on the counter came out of the backpack and by the time I got home it was feeling mighty heavy:)  We have Mission brand tortilla's....although my friend gave me a great recipe for homemade ones that are fantastic.....cream cheese from Wisconsin, butter from New Zealand, and mozzarella from some other place......the eggs, milk,yogurt and chunk of chicken are from China.....how is that for international cuisine?  Those are frozen cranberries on the back left......not sure where they are from, I thought they were only grown in the US but perhaps not.

Can't just jump in the old jalopy and head on over to the store!!!

Love, fondly, sincerely,

zaijian,

Ramona

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