What's going on......

In my neck of the woods.....

I get very frustrated with posting on the blog due to the limiting of access to it by virtue of where we are living.......it is challenging to post as the VPN gets cut off so frequently I can barely post a picture.  Consequently I have been avoiding posting even though we have been doing many things and keeping very busy.
Since I last talked to you I have acquired two new positions at Olivia's school.  I now hold the position of Executive Secretary on the Parent Link Board for the next school year.....going to be very challenging and stretching my skills with all the computer things I will have to do and learn, wish me luck!  I have also taken on the task of inventory keeping in the Middle School-High School store.  It is a small store so I am hoping it won't be too difficult, again it will be challenging my computer skills.  I keep saying it is good that Olivia will still be here to help me learn!
I have been busy attending added meetings and keeping on with life.  I found a neighbor who is a knitter.  She hosted the Beijing Guild Thursday evening meeting a few weeks back.  This Tuesday we went to the daytime meeting.  I haven't been able to go because of driver timing conflict with Mike getting out of work.  It is just a bunch of women who get together, chat and maybe some knitting goes on.  I did some unknitting as I can't seem to keep track of what I am doing while chatting......oh well.
I have also been working on a quilt for a sweet little girl:)  I have managed to make one for each of her siblings when they turned one.....she is 5...I think:)
Now I will show you pictures of this and that.  The Peonies above are in our yard, they looked like that last week, now they are gone.  The roses in the back yard have just started blooming.  We have all tea roses here.  Other houses have brambly climbers with tiny little blossoms, they smell heavenly...ours do not.

Pretty fabric for a quilt!

Pretty blocks for a quilt!

I have been to Wool Spinning City a couple times lately, finally took some pictures of a couple shops.  It is a large, 5 story building full of little individual shops selling wool yarn or fabrics.  They can make  coats, suits, sweaters and other clothes.  Whatever you want.  If you have a favorite sweater that is wearing out, bring it in and they can copy it so you won't ever have to do without!

The large cone spools on the wall shelves are very fine yarn for machine knitting.  They have many types of yarn available in skeins.  I picked up some different kinds to try my hand at working with cotton and weird textures.  Much more than I need, sharing with my mom:)

These booties are the same pattern  my mother has been making for just about forever, and here they are in the shops in China!  Had to get pictures to show my mom.  The pink ones actually have a little detail she doesn't do, I have to go back and have them teach me how to do it.

This is another shop in the Wool Spinning City.  The ladies are so helpful and offer to teach us anything we want to learn....the challenge for me of course is my Chinese is very limited.  If this place was closer to our house I would go everyday and I am sure my Chinese and knitting skills would improve, alas....

Hope you had fun reading.

Love, fondly, sincerely,

Zaijian,

Ramona

Spring

Into Summer!

My roses grew up when I wasn't looking.  This is the view out my sewing room window. Plus some outside shots as well.

Looks like summer here!

I know I haven't been blogging much...been very busy and the VPN cut out three times on this tiny post...Soooo frustrating!

Love, fondly, sincerely,

Zaijian,

Ramona

Midnight in Peking

A book.  About a murder of a young woman.
In Peking in 1937.

Paul French came to WAB recently and I had the chance to go on a walking tour of the legation quarter in Peking where this murder took place.
In the name of progress and with the huge increase in the mass of humanity in China it is very changed from 1937 but several places in the book are still visible if you know what you are looking for.  Paul French knows what he is looking for.  Beijing used to be called Peking among other things.  In 1949 the communist party went back to calling it Beijing.

This is Paul French talking to us at the entrance to the badlands mentioned in the book.

The entrance to the courtyard that was her home on Amour Factory Alley.  It has been closed up and the courtyard filled in, divided up into many residences.

The Fox Tower where her body was found.

The base of the tower, approximate location of discovery.

The apartment building where the dentist lived.

The Dentist's street sign today.

It was a good book and a nice tour.  

Read the book:)

Love, fondly, sincerely,

Zaijian,

Ramona

We had enough

Chinese food.

On our vacation anyway.

 I try to document what we eat but don't always remember......This was at the end of the meal.  The tour guide would order food for us without asking what we might like......In the future If we ever take another trip with a private guide I will try to be more active in ordering our food....Like no soup, we didn't eat any of the soups and they always got us one.  They did seem to always order Kung Pao Chicken which we do like.  There is such waste, usually they ordered us 5 dishes of food, we never eat that much in a meal.

This is the soup we didn't eat.  Very fatty pork and not very tasty.  

 The Kung Pao, almost gone.  That is  chopsticks at the top of the picture coming for another morsel.
We had plenty of practice with chopsticks!!  Tons of HOT peppers!

 Food on the hoof or perhaps their claws.....we didn't eat any pheasant but could have.  This was in an area of restaurants at Mt. Emei when we went walking around looking for dinner (dinner wasn't included in the tour so we were on our own.)
Rabbits too and little squirmy crawfish and even snails.  Tell them what you want and they will cook it up.

 Sometimes we even had our own rooms in the restaurants.  A very common practice here among the Chinese.  It was always amusing because the table are meant for much bigger groups than three.  I guess we had 6 dishes at this one plus a huge bowl of rice.

 This strange, board like substance was for sale in many places in Emeishan.  I asked the guide about it the next day and he said it is some type of plant substance...you get that sort of answer when there is no easy translation or they don't know what it is.


So for lunch, seven dishes, he ordered us some.  It must be some sort of  fungus.  I think it took on the flavor of what it was cooked in/with.   The guide says he doesn't like it.

 It was  spongy and no longer dry as in the above shot.  They cut it into bite size chunks and cooked it up with a bunch of stuff.  I thought it was pretty tasty, Mike didn't really like it.  I wonder if there is any other way to prepare it?  Who was the first person to try it?  In its dried state it looks like dried up sea sponge.

I didn't get pictures on the cruise as it was served buffet style and I didn't eat the Chinese food.  Made do with the bit of western fare they provided........

Love, fondly,sincerely,

Zaijian,

Ramona

More Spring Reports

When we got here last summer I thought the leaves on these trees in the yard looked like Forsythia, but they were trees, how could they be?
Because they prune them to this bizarre shape, that's how!  I am used to a bushy, multi-stemmed blob, these look like giant yellow lollipops.  Not sure I like them this way.  They are trying to grow in their normal way, shoots coming up out of the ground like crazy.  It is challenging at best to communicate with the gardeners here and you never know when they will show up so I guess I live with lollipops for the time I am here.....not so long.

So pretty!

Lemon lollipop anyone?

Peonies sprouting.

Roses are progressing nicely.

The roses out back are further behind, not as much sun.  

Love, fondly, sincerely,

Zaijian,

Ramona

A funny thing happened.......

On the way to Chengdu.......

Or maybe not so funny......
This is Olivia and I waiting at the Chengdu airport. You might think Mike is taking the picture....he is not.
When we got to the airport the plane let us off somewhere in the middle of the tarmac where we transferred to a bus to the terminal....so far so good.  As we crossed the threshold of the terminal Mike thought of something which made him think of something else....yeah, the passports are in the camera bag, yeah, the camera bag is on the floor of the plane under the seat in front of mine......Not a good thought!!  I gathered our luggage while Mike and Olivia went to find help in getting back his bag....Not so easy here where there is very little English spoken by the majority of the populace.  Mike ended up calling his Admin, Iris, and having her speak to the people behind the counter who told her that when the cleaning crew found it it would be turned in to lost and found and then we could claim it......who knew how long that might be.....Well, Iris is very tenacious and told them that would not do and apparently it worked.  One of the people behind the counter went off and was back within just a few minutes with the bag.......Nightmares avoided!!!!!  The biggest nightmare being you cannot check into a hotel without a passport in China.
Meanwhile, after I got the bags Mike sent me and Olivia out to find our tour guide......He/she is nowhere to be found!  It turns out he has the sign he is supposed to be holding UP rolled into a tube in his hand.  Not sure who told him that would make it easy for us to spot him.......While we are searching for him every taxi driver in the place is coming up to us saying....taxi?, taxi?.  How many times have you got to say "bu yao"?  Also, the ones who come up to you like that are the ones who are not registered or legal taxis.  You will most likely get charged an astronomical fee if you get in one of those cars.  We have them right here in Beijing too.
All was settled and we headed out into Chengdu to have some dinner.......Chinese food.

Bedtime the first day.

Love, fondly, sincerely,
Zaijian,
Ramona

Springing

Plants in the yard today.....
We leave for Chengdu on Saturday for 9 days.  Today I walked around the yard to see what is sprouting from the earth.  They say Spring happens rapidly here so I may miss seeing what some of the plants do....
Here is what I saw.

A bush I do not yet know the name of.....perhaps when it blooms and leafs out I can figure it out....of course when I ask I get Chinese names for things and they never know the English.......and I don't know the Chinese.   An excellent example is the name of our compound....Beijing Riviera, seems straightforward......
Nope, Xiang Jiang Hua Yuan.......is what you must tell the taxi driver:)

These are the Peony just starting to shoot out of the ground, there was nothing there last Friday.

The roses continue to thrive.  In the fuzzy background a chrysanthemum has returned at the base of another rose.

Watch out for those thorns!

We will see how they all look when we return on April 8th.

Love, fondly, sincerely,

zaijian,

Ramona