Month: August 2020

I forgot that I had a second post on our Thailand trip in October, so I’m finishing this one quick to add!

It was pretty rainy during our trip to Bangkok, and you can tell from Alex and Mark dripping during dinner how wet that walk had been.

We went back to our favorite game cafe Throne of Games. We played Sushi go Party, which we liked so much we bought our own copy of it.

We also got to play the remake of Fireball Island. This was such a cool game when I was a kid and I loved playing it when we went to my Oma’s house. So when they made a new version of it, I really wanted to get it. It’s fun, but not so fun that I needed to spend $150 on it or whatever it was.

After games, we went to Bangkok’s Korea town and had some fantastic food. I can’t remember the names of anything we got, but it was all great.

We had been at the doctor’s earlier that day getting Alex’s other ear tube removed and he took a kid’s face mask and had it in his pocket. We put it on his head, I thought it was hysterical, I think Mark thought we were crazy!

After dinner, we went a couple doors down to a Bing Su place. Bing Su is shaved ice, but instead of water, the ice is made with milk. So it’s little like ice cream but much healthier because it’s only milk, and then it’s topped with all sorts of goodies. The one Alex has here is just shaved milk and strawberries, but he has in the past had things that are piled high with cookies and chocolate.

I’m going to take a second here and tell you about this doctor’s visit. You might wonder why we didn’t just take him to the doctor in China -you know, since we live there and all. China doesn’t do ear tubes, it’s not a thing they’re familiar with, and while we’ve had really good experiences so far with the doctors there, we thought language barriers plus a procedure they’re not familiar with wasn’t our best option.

We have always heard good things about medical care in Thailand, and the boys had had a good experience at the dentist office there, so we looked into a doctor there to check his ears.

We went to Bumrungrad International hospital, and the doctor who saw Alex was not only an MD but also a PhD who teaches Ear Nose and Throat to incoming med students, we really couldn’t have asked for a better situation. It is a very fancy hospital, with top notch wait rooms and staff- the wait was pretty short for our appointment. It was as different an experience from the nightmare emergency ear situation in Illinois as could possible be, he got drops to numb the ear, he couldn’t even feel it being removed. The doctor talked to him and not us, made sure that Alex didn’t have any questions or concerns and then addressed us. We got to see the pulled out tube, and kiddo was good to go.

The experience was so good that I made an appointment for myself to get two moles removed that I had wanted gone for years. Alex’s costs with no insurance costs less than one doctor’s visit with no procedures in the US. Mine were a bit more because it was a cosmetic procedure- but I’ve literally never been happier with them gone, well worth the money. We will go back to Bumrungrad for any non emergency procedures we can. Imagine going to see the doctor getting something done and resting and recovering on the beach in Thailand- what could be better?

I think everyone knows at this point how much we like escape rooms, so we did one in Bangkok, well really we did two, but I only got pictures at one. This was room number 1. The company offered a Star Wars room that we really wanted to do with Alex, but they said it’s really hard and less than 10% of people finish it. So to avoid disappointment we tried this one first.

You start in a jail cell and have to escape into the main room to find the Nazi codes to escape the room in general. We did it with 15 minutes to spare and no clues given- however, there were two things not returned to the way they were supposed to be so we got two free things that we didn’t have to figure it out.

I didn’t take pictures after Star Wars because we were pretty mad about it. There were two elements in the room (at least maybe even three ) that did not work, so we wasted 10 minutes trying to figure out a clue that we had right, but the light was broken so we didn’t know we had it right. And when we finally got into the second room there was no way to win it because of that loss of 10 minutes in addition to having to shoot targets that even though the laser hits them don’t register as completed. We say we won that one anyway because every completable puzzle we were able to finish it. The boss wasn’t there when we did this room and the kid who wasn’t running it didn’t care that we told him things were broken.

There was a famous restaurant in Chinatown that Mark wanted to go visit, and it was a good chance to check out the chinatown there- we’d always talked about it but never did it. The restaurant was ok, I thought not as good as the hype but perfectly good food. The cool part was the parade going on outside. We had to go to Chinatown in Thailand to see a dragon parade, we’ve never seen one in China!

The last day in Thailand we went to brunch at this little cafe across from the hotel, we walked past it every day and never tried it. It was adorable, all rabbit themed and just a small inside sitting area. Because the air pollution was pretty high while we were there they had closed the outside tables.

Between moving to Houston, getting settled here and trying to catch up on all my work, the blog here has gotten lonely. I will try hard to keep this more updated.

The good news about Houston, aside from getting to see family we don’t get to see that often, is that Alex has a friend in the apartment complex who is his age and may even end up being in his class at the new Houston school (which also teaches Mandarin, so he might get to catch up on his Chinese). The downside is that like every move, its starting over. We bought a car, figured out the grocery stores, and how to get around the downtown area.

So this post is just going to be a catch up post, with those fun pictures that didn’t fit into another post but I didn’t have enough to make one whole post about.

We have a tea shop in Haining, that I think I’ve mentioned in other posts. We go there all the time, and Mark and I almost always get the exact same thing- lemon teas. Picture an iced tea with a bit of sugar and a whole lemon squeezed into it, and for extra kicks they leave the lemon in the cup. It’s refreshing, and light and exactly what you need for an afternoon pickup- especially when we can take the scooters over there. When we bring Alex with us (on non school days of course) he has a couple favorites he gets, a strawberry tea, which is a very light oolong tea with lots of strawberries blended and smashed in, or a grape tea. This picture below is sitting outside the tea shop on a coolish fall day, showing us how purple his tongue got from his grape tea. The lady who owns the tea shop is really nice and they all love to see and talk to Alex.

We took a weekend trip into Shanghai with our friends Sebastian and Belinda, they hadn’t had a good experience yet in the city and we wanted to show them some of our favorite things there. We did things that people on this blog will be familiar with, like a trip to Boom Boom Bagels and new things like a friend recommended restaurant called Da Dong Duck (Mark, correct me if that’s not right) which is a Michelin star restaurant – the first I’ve ever been to.

Funny story about Da Dong, we were all excited to go, we of course ordered the Peking Duck- it’s the reason to be there, but on the menu was this beautiful crab dish and we all thought it looked great. So with our trusty Chinese translator Alex, we tried to order the crab- the waiter was trying to tell us how much it would cost per pound and we were like, yeah- fine cool, let’s get the smallest one and do this. And then the waiter leaves and comes back with the chef, carrying the largest crab I’ve ever seen in my life on a cutting board. I mean, we’re talking a crab the size of a two year old. We all stared and then started doing the calculations and it would have been around $1600 worth of crab. We politely said no thanks, and thanked them for clearing up our confusion on what we were ordering!

That same weekend we met with a friend of my advisor and her husband. Laura and John live in Shanghai and have been there for at least a few years, but I think more like 10 or more. They were kind enough to invite us for a brunch at Mr & Mrs Bund, a fancy french restaurant right on the Bund. John and Laura are a wonderful couple, and we had such a good time with them. Laura and I had the most amazing bloody Mary’s- complete with cherry peppers and pickles.

Fast forwarding a few weeks, and it was Halloween. Most of you know, Halloween is my jam. It’s my favorite holiday and has been for years. I keep Halloween in my heart all the year the way other people do Christmas. So in this way, China has been a bit hard for me (although I’ve had amazing friends who have sent me little gifts at Halloween to keep around the house, or American Halloween candy– you know who you are!). We organized one year of trick or treating, last year we had a belated “party” just us and Belinda and Sebastian- we watched some horror movies and ate candy.

This past year, our friends Marco and Rachel (owners’ of Rosemary’s restaurant in Haining) had a Halloween party at the bar of Rosemary’s. And the english school in the same strip mall had a party for the kids. Some of the kids from Alex’s school were there, and there were games to play and crafts to do and even a pinata.

Halloween ended for me by taking the boy home (since it may have been a school night, I can’t remember) Mark stayed with some of the other faculty and had an apparently amazing time- there were blood bags full of Sangria, drinks galore, he ended up coming home around 3am. The next day was not nearly as fun!

So many of good memories happen at Rosemary’s, and this one Mark’s favorite. Mark loves to cook, he loves cooking for friends and family, and we have long joked that if academia doesn’t work out – or when he retires that we would open a diner. I’m in charge of breads and desserts, he does everything else. So one day, I don’t even remember how it came up, but Mark asked for a recipe of Marco’s to try at home. And Marco said come in to the restaurant and we’ll cook together. And Mimmo, the other chef of the restaurant showed him another restaurant.

Mimmo taught Mark how to make carbonara