January Blues

After all the excitement of Christmas, we moved into January with a small bang. Coral and james came over, Alex stayed up until midnight for the first New Year’s ever.  I’m pretty sure we had hot-pot.

Coral and James gave Mark a hot plate designed for hot-pot for Christmas, since then we’ve been trying things out and improving on hotpot at home.  We’ve figured out what meat to buy, where to get the best mushrooms,  I even bought live shrimp and brought them home for Mark and James.  We’ve got our sauce station down, and even bought special sauce bowls just for this purpose.  So when you come to visit, we will do hot-pot.

New Year’s eve and day had the worst pollution we’ve seen in China yet. Normally here in Haining our numbers are between 50-120, on New Year’s it was 345. It was so smoggy that when we went to the mall, there was smog inside the halls of the mall.  Alex wore his face mask and Mark and I become motivated to find some for ourselves.   We didn’t go out much for a few days because it was still so polluted. We’re very lucky that it is a once in a long while event for our area to get so polluted.

Alex had to go back to school and I had to go back to work.  This month has been just a lot of work for all us, Alex had end of terms exams which lasted a whole week, Mark has been working on proposals and papers and research, and I have been unofficially promoted to 1/2 of the international recruiting team for our institute.   In addition to my other duties, I’m now involved in our Facebook page, virtual open day, and so very many emails.  I’ve been studying to take my driver’s license test here as well. It’s taken a while for me to get caught up to speed on everything, which is why there hasn’t been much blogging this month.

Mark’s birthday is in the middle of january, and so is mine and our anniversary,  so we went out to a new restaurant to celebrate.  While it wasn’t as good as we were hoping, it was a really beautiful atmosphere and good friends to share it with.  We have a new friend who joined us from Urbana for the semester (and maybe longer), Kent, so we dragged him out with us too.

Right now, we’re counting down the days, because tomorrow starts our month-long vacation. The university (and most other things as well) shuts down for the month of February for the Spring Festival (Also known as Chinese New Year).  Because Alex had two weeks off at Christmas, he only has two weeks off for the Feb. holiday.  But we’re planning on exploring more of local (ish) China, another visit to Wuzhen, visiting Shanghai for the first time, and going back to Hangzhou.