Author: travelingexpatfamily

It’s literally been years now since I’ve posted on here, but I’m back and have finished my PhD and am ready to catch up on all the adventures that our family has had.

I left us in Chengdu, and I will return to that trip and finish writing those blog posts. However, since then, we’ve moved to the UK, Scotland specifically and have started our new life here. So there will be plenty of new posts as I catch up on 4 years worth of stuff.

We have always been lucky with finding friends, no matter what country we are in, and China has been no different. A fellow student in my PhD program invited us to go to her home and meet her parents, and we ended up going several times and really getting to know her family.

As we were getting ready to go to Chengdu for 3 weeks in the summer so that Mark could teach in a summer program for Sichuan University, we stopped by Yue’s (my friend) house as a pit stop to the airport. Yue’s mom and Auntie made dumplings with us and even taught Alex the right way to fold a dumpling. While mine don’t look nearly as pretty as theirs do, they still taste good!

This is Yue’s Auntie mixing up the dumpling mix.

Alex, Yue’s mom and Yue getting ready to start making the dumplings.

Yue’s mom with one completed tray of dumplings, if you’ve never had homemade dumplings you are missing out! I really enjoy the process of making them too, it’s like meditation really.

Yue’s parents think Alex is great because he can speak Chinese and he loves tea- they are always thrilled when he comes over. He even came up with tea related nicknames for all the parents, auntie and uncle, even me and Mark.

Alex getting to taste the first dumpling because they like him more than the rest of us!

Yue and her Dad, who is discussing something important about our upcoming trip with Alex as he and Yue have to act as our translators for everything.

Every time we come over, they have a big bowl of cucumbers for me, it’s one of my favorites, and though it’s not pictured here, when it’s mixed with garlic, peppers and soy sauce it is the best salad a person could have.

A steaming bowl of dumplings that we all helped make- what a great way to spend an afternoon as a family.

After lunch we move over to the tea table for as much tea as we can handle and even more snacks. This is where Yue’s dad has taught Alex all about tea, the Chinese zodiac, and we all just relax and chat before leaving for the airport.

One uneventful flight later and we landed in Chengdu. We walked into the hotel that the University had booked for us, and it had the prettiest lobby.

Fountain with plants and fog, and a slightly grumpy Mark. There is even a musician that plays in the rocky formation behind the waterfall at certain times of day.

I’m so behind on this blog, so this kid has changed dramatically, but it’s nice to remember his fresh little face.

As you’ve seen on previous posts, I really love the unique shingles and end tiles on roofs in China, so every time I see a new one, I have to grab a picture of it.

Chengdu is known for many things; the Giant Panda Research Center, lots of temples, one of the oldest tea houses, Sichuan Opera- and of course- good food. Mark had so many wonderful places lined up for us to try, so on our very first day we went out for Dan Dan Mian. It’s a small local place (you know we love our little shops) and it had outside seating. Chengdu in July is hot! Spicy dan dan mian helps cool you down – they may not look like much here, but this is before mixing the hot chili oil from the bottom. They are traditional made with pork, noodles, chili oil and sometimes peanuts.

Here are the boys enjoying the first tastes of real dan dan noodles. You can see a bit more of the scenery, this is a small place off a busy road but the road the restaurant is on is mostly residential.

Alex felt the noodles were maybe a bit spicy!

Below is another Chengdu speciality, spicy wontons. I first got this dish at a Chinese place in California with friends and absolutely loved it, so getting to try it where it originated from was a real treat. It exceeded my expectations and as I’m writing this up it’s making me want a bowl right now!

As you can see by the clean bowls and thumbs up, this place was a win for the boys! Honestly, everything was fantastic and the staff were lovely and very curious about Alex and us, I’d go back here any day.

Just around the corner from the noodle shop was a main touristy shopping street, and to cool down from both the heat of the day and the heat of the noodles and wontons, Mark found a bingsu spot nearby.

I wrote about Bingsu on one of the Thailand posts, but to save you from having to go back- bingsu is a Korean shaved milk dessert. It can come in a relatively plain form, or all decked out in fruit, sweets, syrups- anything a young boy could want.

Alex picked an oreo bingsu, that when it came we realized how huge it was- which is also typical of bingsu. The texture is light and fluffy, and melts in your mouth. If you ever get a chance to try one, I highly recommend it!

Mark and I decided to share a peach bingsu, we had originally wanted a different fruit but they were out and it was peach season, so you get what you get!

Our came with sauces and jellies and creams on the side, we didn’t do much with them because we thought the dish itself was sweet enough.

Not a bad way to start a working holiday if you ask me!

As soon as I hit publish on the last post and went to look at ideas for this post, I realized that we had another weekend in Shanghai as Alex participated in a TEDx talk organized by his school. Alex, along with his good friends Johnny and Dylan, did a group talk on the benefits and drawbacks of AI. Other than a few hiccups ( they had a picture of a different Alex from his school, and the boys were told that they had 5 minutes when they only really had 3) it was a great time. The boys did a fantastic job and were really proud of themselves.

I can’t believe I forgot this trip to Shanghai!

After the TEDx talk, Alex got to go with Johnny to the Gundam store in Shanghai, he was so thrilled. Johnny really got Alex invested in Gundam, which if you haven’t seen is kind of like Voltron from when we were kids, except it’s one giant robot per person instead of the lions. Or maybe it’s more like Transformers but the robots aren’t sentient? I clearly don’t know even after all this time.

There are a few places in Shanghai that were new to us on this trip, and this was us queued outside a famous crab noodle/crab xiao long bao place. I think we waited over an hour in the heat, but it was absolutely worth it.

The decor inside was kitschy and cool, I loved the Tiffany parrot lamps, and the old school

Believe it or not, this picture below is the best picture I got of Mark, the other one he is almost actively glaring at me.

Alex on the other hand is always willing to pose for me and take nice pictures!

Here are the beautiful noodles, so there is a sauce under the noodles, but just to the right in the smaller scalloped bowl is the crab sauce, you pour that on and then mix it all together. Heaven in a bowl!

Mark of course was in charge of mixing, we only got one to share amongst the three of us, with other things coming along too.

Then came the crab xiaolong bao. I think I’ve described xiaolong bao on the blog before, but if you’re new or don’t remember, it is a dumpling that has a filling (in the case crab and crab roe) and a soup, so there is a technic to eating it to prevent burning your mouth. I don’t think I do the official technic, but I bite a hole, then pour the soup onto my spoon to cool down while I eat the dumpling and then finish with the soup. Absolutely delicious!

I took this one at the train station waiting for our train back to Haining, I just thought it was a nice example of “like Father, like son”.

So there has been a long hiatus on the blog, moving to a new city, getting everyone and everything set up took longer than I thought and I hit a wall with writing about our adventures in China because I miss my friends there. But we’re back and both need a procrastination tool and a writing prompt so we’ll pick up where we left off.

Also for Chinese New Year we went into Shanghai and had one of the last visits to Shanghai without knowing it would be one of the last. One place I know I’ve mentioned in a previous post is our favorite sesame noodle place. It’s always packed with a line, very tight community seating of if a space opens up you take it, regardless as to whether you know your table mates or not.

In this picture below, Alex and I are sitting at a half table against the cash register and Mark is behind Alex at the table next to us. Alex is an expert at getting his noodles all mixed up so the sesame sauce is on every bite.

My noodles below, Mark and I get a spicy pork addition to mix in to our noodles. There is so much stuff it’s hard to mix the noodles without getting sauce everywhere.

After a filling noodle lunch, we went to the Shanghai Natural History Museum, our group loves a museum and we had been waiting for a while to go to this one on a day where not every student in Shanghai would also be there.

Even the signs pointing the way to the museum are beautiful, I loved this mosaic sign leading to the entrance.

It’s funny to see this picture now, as this was still Covid-19 prevention methods time in China, but also because Alex has grown so much since this was taken.

I loved the life size models hanging from the ceiling and the whole animal section really.

There are lots of exhibits that are done well at the Shanghai Museum but the animal section is both impressive and hilarious.

Different species of turtles, to compare size and shapes between species/

And the life cycle of a turtle from egg to turtle to skeleton. I thought it was a neat way to present it.

I think this may be one of the largest variety of taxidermied monkeys I had ever seen. They had the monkeys posed in some odd positions, but you could see most of the features and they were all labeled in English and in Chinese.

A colleague brought Alex back a t-shirt from Uganda with the national bird of Uganda the grey crowned crane, and we saw a stuffed version of the bird so Alex wanted to pose with his shirt showing.

I know that a paragraph or two ago I said that the museum was also hilarious, and we’re going to get into that now.

This gorilla was given human glass eyes when he was taxidermied, and it gives him the most cringey look, like he has just waved at someone and then realized he doesn’t actually know them. I was cracking up about this.

If you type in Shanghai museum and lions, this next guy will come up in your search page, and while I was expecting it because I had seen the pictures, but it so much better in person.

I don’t know if the person who did the taxidermy was new, or had never seen a lion, but it is the most comical version of a lion that I’ve ever seen. All 3 of us were laughing like crazy over his derpy face.

The muzzle of the lion was smushed in a bit, and curved up at the ends giving him a deer in the headlights look. This poor lion alone was worth the price of admission– and I would go back just to see him again. Between him and the gorilla, the joy that they brought me was immeasurable.

This poor leopard isn’t looking so good either, but not as bad as the poor lion. And lest I seem too critical, I have seen similarly messed up animals at the Field museum in Chicago, just not quite this bad.

The boys humoring me in front of the wooly mammoth.

The museum had this really large and impressive butterfly house in the middle of the museum, with a huge variety of butterflies. A few, like this first picture, were a little worse for wear as it seemed like we were there at the end of the season.

I’ve never been that into butterflies, I think they’re beautiful like most people, but beyond a few basic types I don’t know what kinds they are. Feel free to comment below if any of these are ones that jump out at you.

This guy was one of my favorites, I love the green and blue iridescence on the wings, which got a little lost in the glare of the glass.

I like taking pictures of butterflies (and dragonflies) and flowers the most, I think flowers are my favorite subject.

Fossilized dragonflies, I thought this was just the coolest, but again, I have a thing for dragonflies.

I thought I had taken a video of the t-rex in action, but if I did, I can’t find it now. It breathes, roars, and moves, and then you can see the muscles inside move as they would during those actions. It was a neat exhibit, but lacks something without the video.

It was the year of the Ox that year, so they had oxes set up around the museum, I managed to get 2 pictures of the boys with them before the boys were done.

Almost at the end of the museum, there was this long hallway, and it had different mini rooms each filled with a large variety of one thing. For example, one room had spears, one room had eggs I think of different animals, but my favorite was the insects. They had hundreds, if not thousands, of insects to see up close.

This one came out terribly, but I kept it because it was the only one I got of this butterfly and I thought it was so beautiful that blurry is better than not seeing it.

This was my favorite piece in the whole museum, and is currently the wallpaper on my computer.

There is something zen like about this and it just makes me relaxed.

Our last day of the weekend in Shanghai was spent getting the best breakfast item that China has to offer in my opinion. I know I’ve mentioned this one before but I don’t think at this location. Mark and Alex found this place when they went to Shanghai while I was in Uganda and they talked about how good it was and how cool his set up was.

This man is making jian bing, it’s a non sweet pancake with egg, crispy crackers, and spicy sauce rolled up like a burrito. You can add meat, sausages, or other vegetables too, but we always just get the simple version.

The reason this guy’s set up is cool is that he is using a throttle and engine off of an ebike to spin the round hot plate that the crepe cooks on. Everyone else that we’ve ever seen has had a stationary one and moves their arms in the circular motion needed to smooth out the crepe batter. It’s clever and lets him make more with less effort, and he makes the best jian bing in Shanghai (I think).

The downside is there is no seating, so we found a covered wall to keep us dry while we ate our treats.

Alex was trying to make the whole Jian bing fit in his mouth, it is/was a bit of a hike to this area to get breakfast, but it is absolutely worth the journey.

Hopefully all our favorite places survived the lockdowns and are still available for you to go visit when you go to China!

There’s been a long gap between posts, partially because of Covid and partially because of school. Both of these have made writing hard, especially given that both seem to be lasting forever. In addition, there’s been a change of venue for the Traveling Family- we’ve moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. We’ll be there for a year while I finish the PhD (although Mark will go back to China before then). But, we’re back and writing again and need to catch up! I will try not to get so behind as we have to finish up China adventures so I can share our new city with you.

My timeline of the Wuyi trip may be off, but I think this was the last day we spent on this trip. It was a bit rainy and we went to see a local river town.

I’ve always been a fan of the decorative artwork put in places it didn’t need to be, have a wall around your building? Make it beautiful.

The roof tile end stops are something I look for now too, they are often unique to one building (or sometimes a neighborhood area). I’ve seen many different faces and designs on them, but this one is in my top five. I love the face he’s making and there was just a row of hundreds of them.

Doesn’t this look like China in the movies, or in the Chinese paintings you see everywhere? Misty mountains stacked up, it looked like the pictures the university hung in our apartment.

Rachel took us to the local temple, which if I remember correctly was a Chinese Buddhist temple. This is one of the two door guards- we’ve seen them on temples in China and in Thailand.

Now, by now in the blog, you should know I have a thing for temples. I’d go to all the temples, but Alex gets bored and even Mark gets done after a few of them. This one was really cool because of it’s location, in the misty mountain village with the open center space and the rain slightly falling. You couldn’t ask for a more picturesque location. We all broke off inside to look at different things, but the whole group of 3 families were there.

This time we didn’t buy any joss sticks to pray with, but the altar for putting them in was beautiful and ornate.

Even the feet of the altar were decorative.

Not my best picture, but I do love the Chinese phoenix style. I think one of my next tattoos will be a Chinese phoenix.

I don’t know if he sees this blog, but I always take pictures of different kinds of bee houses for my Brother in law, Joe. He is a beekeeper by trade, and if you’ve ever gotten honey from us, it came from his bees (https://thehoneyhouse.com/).

These supers are from the area behind our hotel there, but there were also some in town that looked like these too. I haven’t seen anyone collecting the honey from these yet, but there are lots of people selling local honey.

When we left Wuyi, the three families decided we hadn’t seen enough of each other yet, and planned a follow up visit the next day in Haiyan, a Haining adjacent town that was also scenic and watery.

Anna was in a good mood, and one of the only kids not to grumble when I asked for a picture. Because this was still early in 2021, we were still wearing masks in all public places in China.

Around the lake, there were several artists using different art styles painting the lake and scenery. You could walk around and view them, a few people even had previous paintings you could buy.

These beautiful flowers look a little like cherry blossoms, but I believe they are actually plum blossoms. They are such a vibrant dark pink and they were all planted in a big section.

I think I like taking pictures of flowers and plants most of all, they don’t complain about how long you’re taking!

Getting pictures of the kids is always an adventure- Here we’ve got Alex, Nichole and Emma, with Anna in the front. These 4 are together a lot, for most holidays and major events. Emma and Nichole have been best friends for years, and Alex often plays big brother to Anna and keeps her out of the big girls way.

And what visit to a garden in China would be complete without the foo dog statues. I love collecting pictures of them, especially unique ones with different features.

Marco leading the kids down a rock path around the lake.

This gazebo is famous, it was featured in a Chinese movie or soap opera- Rachel explained it to me, but it wasn’t a movie or show that I was familiar with.

While we were walking around, we heard singing and as we followed the path around, there were two people in Chinese Opera costumes singing their songs and being filmed.

It was such a unique experience to be in this ancient garden and hearing opera being sung by professionals. And they were so kind they didn’t mind us taking photos and videos of their performance .

This time just the adults, and actually I think this may be the only picture I have of all the adults in this group together.

After his disastrous run in with the fake rock structure at the hotel in Wuyi, Marco is taking the time to warn everyone about the sign instructing you to watch your head. Fortunately for me, I’m short enough not to be in any danger, Marco is not so lucky.

Coming to the garden was a great follow up to the families’ trip to Wuyi, we had such a good time, and many inside jokes that are still funny 18 months later. How lucky we are to have such good friends that made it so hard to leave China.

I don’t say this lightly, but this trip may have been one of my favorite trips in China. We had good food, good times and good friends…. and also fireworks. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but we were under the impression that China was the land of fireworks. Whenever we learned about China in school or tv it always showed New Years celebrations with lots of fireworks. However, since we moved to China, no fireworks, not any! Our town outlawed fireworks about a year before we moved here. But on our way in to Wuyi, we stopped at a store and bought a big box of fireworks and smaller boxes of sparklers and butterflies and some evil little popper things.

The picture below is Mark and Marco sharing some homemade meiju, a rice based alcohol that is positively lethal! Over a year later and two lockdowns there is still a significant amount of this bottle left. This was the aperitif to go along with a game of Risk.

We can’t remember what day of the three day trip this happened, maybe the first day? But as you walked into the hotel, there was this staircase incased in a fake rock tunnel. None of us got pictures of the offending rock tunnel, but poor Marco, the tallest in the group hit his head on the ceiling of the stupid tunnel. He got a cut that the scar is still visible over a year later- and we all learned new swear words in Italian.

Pre lunch sillies with Alex , Anna and Marco.

I love this picture Rachel took of Alex, he looks like an 80’s model.

The next day we went to Rachel’s village up in the mountains. I am a very (perhaps overly) confident driver with one notable exception- I don’t like curvy mountain roads, especially not with just one tiny metal barrier between me and falling of the side of a mountain. If I can see the drop off or how high we are, I get very nervous and drive very slow. This makes for a slow drive to the village where it is about an hour when you go quickly. And Marco who is familiar and comfortable with the road can drive it very fast.

It is also a very small road with just enough room for two cars if they both move all the way to the edge. Poor Alex was very carsick by the time we got to the village.

Rachel took this picture through the sunroof of their car as we followed them down the mountain.

Along the way to the village is another small village known for it’s chilis, every door had chilis hanging around it. It is a good halfway point through the mountains to the village so we stopped to take a break.

Mark and Marco being good sports about taking chili pictures for me, since the kids wanted nothing to do with it.

This sign just made me laugh, I don’t know what the peppers are saying, but for it to be such a stereotypical picture in the middle of China- I had to take a picture.

The village makes a really big deal about being Chili Town, complete with giant statue of chilis. This spot has become a mental note to me that we are 1/2 way there.

Along the way, we saw several of these beautiful stone carvings and monuments in the hills, we’d never seen anything like that anywhere else in China. These are family tombstones, I don’t know if they are for just one person are more of a mausoleum style. I think they are absolutely beautiful, this one below has the traditional phoenix and dragon at the top.

This is the view from the top, it’s beautiful, but really high up! I asked Mark to take these pictures because I was too afraid to go to the edge.

When we got to the village, Rachel’s dad took us even farther up to go fishing at his local spot. This lake is right next to a large pig farm. Rachel’s dad was so patient with the kids (and the adults) because this was a different style of fishing rod and casting than we were used to.

Alex was getting a little frustrated that he hadn’t caught anything, I managed to catch the first fish. I was not much of a fishing person before this, but I think I enjoy it now (but I also don’t want to clean them).

Alex caught the second fish (we only caught two- Mark caught a bigger one but it managed to escape).

Then for the main event, we were there to celebrate Rachel’s grandma on what would have been her 100th birthday. The whole village came to participate. There was a table set with food and candles, and prayers and paper ingots.

It was a beautiful remembrance and it was clear to see how important she was to the community.

This man is folding (and teaching the kids) how to fold paper ingots to burn with prayers and thoughts written by people attending. The idea being that the person will receive them and have everything they need in the afterlife. There was a man doing prayers that would continue praying until the next day as part of the ceremony.

Also to honor her grandma, the village had fireworks. This is one of the coolest fireworks displays, better than some towns in the US have for 4th of July!

My biggest mistake was standing too close to the first set of fireworks and getting hit by flying crackers.

The boys in the aftermath of the fireworks, all the red bits on the ground are from the crackers. And Mark still has a handful of bottle rockets, butterfly spinners and mini crackers that were set off at random during the trip.

At this point it was getting close to midnight, and while the ceremony would continue through until the morning, our group went back to the hotel.

I can’t ever thank Rachel enough for including us in this special trip- we got to experience traditional practices, kind welcoming people, beautiful scenery and good times with good friends. This night is something I’ll remember forever.

The first spring festival back in China, we got invited to go with our friends back to her home town to celebrate the 100th birthday of her grandmother who had passed. We hadn’t done much local travelling and we were excited to spend time with our friends outside of their restaurant where they could relax too.

We formed a caravan with their car, and another Italian Chinese family of friends and drove to Wuyi, about 3 hours away from home but still in the same province.

This was an adventure for me because I really hadn’t done much highway driving in China, mostly just trips around town and one trip to the Hangzhou. The way was nice, Mark and Alex are really into the podcasts while driving so we listened to lots of Radio Lab.

It was a bit funny to road trip with other people since I’m used to long distance driving across the US. We stopped about halfway for the last Starbucks and to get up and stretch because some people were already tired of the car. I don’t know that they’d enjoy a road trip with me and Alex!

When we got to Wuyi we checked into our homestay hotel, it was small, only maybe 10 rooms. And even though Marco warned us, I was not prepared for the firmness of the bed. Here in China, people, particularly older people, prefer to sleep on hard mattresses- and to be honest, they have a hard time sleeping on the marshmallowy soft mattresses Westerners prefer. I’ve gotten used to some harder beds in hotels, but this was a bit like laying a padded piece of wood. I may be exaggerating, but I genuinely thought I might have bruises from the bed.

That being said, the lady who runs the homestay was very nice and friendly, and we ate a fantastic lunch there when we first arrived. I would stay there again no problem, but I would probably bring a sleeping bag or air mattress to put on top of the mattress.

Is it even a trip in China if I don’t take at least one Foo Dog picture? I like these too for the same reason that they’re all similar but unique too, even if only the way that they are worn by the weather in the area or by where they are touched by people visiting.

Even the Shingles are cool, the decorative end of the shingles is another thing that I’ve started collecting pictures of. They are unique to regions, and usually to each building but I have seen in some areas that multiple buildings there have the same endcap.

Below are Vicky and Anna, half of the second Italian Chinese family we travelled with, I thought this picture really captured the happy nature of these two. Anna (the daughter) was only 5 in this picture and chasing Alex around most of the trip. He loves being the big brother figure, so it was ok with him!

While twisting through the old town, we ended up in and out of buildings to explore. I didn’t realize until afterwards that these are peoples’ homes that they are still currently living in. Imagine a bunch of foreigners traipsing through your kitchen taking pictures of your plants and walls.

This beautiful flower was on a tree in the courtyard of an open kitchen in one of the houses.

These designs are carved in wood or stone depending on the location, I couldn’t believe the detail and the fact that these are so old and still this detailed. I could have spent a whole day just taking pictures of these on the walls, but I was afraid everyone else would leave me behind.

The reality is that these carvings are common on the older homes *when I say older we’re not talking midcentury modern, but some of these homes are hundreds of years old. I wish there was more things in this style around Haining, but they are modernizing everything and some of these details are being lost.

At the end of the old town village, there were a couple restaurants, and another man with the bamboo logs in the fire. When you order one, it is cut open lengthwise and inside is this delicious rice with vegetables, cured pork, and mushrooms.

It was different than anything we had had before, and certainly a memorable experience. The rice was almost sweet and definitely sticky- a great way to end the time in the old town.

We got back into our apartment on December 15th, and that gave us just enough time to set up our Christmas tree and do things mostly like usual.

Nothing like being back in your own home for your own traditions. Not everything arrived in time, and not everything was wrapped completely but for the most part it was a normal holiday at home.

Alex got new ships for their Star Wars Armada game, for those that aren’t familar, it’s a game with lots of figures and little ships that you play on a gigantic table. More than a few tears have been shed about this game, but it is/was his favorite game for a while.

For a long time now, Alex has been using my stocking for his. My mom made that stocking for me when I was little- she made one for Alex too when he was a baby, but he has outgrown that one. She also made Mark’s stocking (not pictured anywhere here) . This year a friend got Alex a personalized stocking that will be his going forward and I’ll get my stocking back.

Stockings for us are mostly small gifts, treats, and things you need, like a bookmark.

Alex has started his own tradition of writing Mark a letter to go with his presents each year, telling Mark about the wonderful things they’ve done together and how Alex feels about him.

One of the great things about being back in China was getting to see and catch up with our friends. Lily, Simon and Elektra have been great friends and as soon as we were back we made plans for a strawberry picking excursion. Lily is one of those people who always knows a cool new place to eat, or something fun to do!

She found this strawberry picking place, attached to it is a park/playground and a great restaurant.

This place has different greenhouses with different types of strawberries, some good for just eating, some good for dipping in chocolate, small and large.

Alex patiently stopping for a picture in between greenhouses.

They had ducks and chickens- you could buy them and take them home but they were expensive. They are fed mostly strawberries which is supposed to affect the way they taste but we haven’t tried them.

He is critcal of what looked like a great strawberry but once he picked it he could see one side was mushy. He did great picking strawberries, which made up for the fact I wasn’t doing so good because I was too busy taking pictures.

Elektra is so fun, she takes a while to warm up to you (and even now gets shy at the very beginning of a get together with us) but once she does, she is a blast to hang out with. She knows all the poses for taking pictures, and when she catches on that you’re filming her- you can’t get another candid shot.

Elektra really likes Alex, and he enjoys being a big brother figure to her.

This is the owner of the strawberry greenhouses, she was with us to show us which places had the best strawberries and help us collect more because we were a little slow.

As you can see from Mark’s basket, we had a lot of luck with finding good strawberries! I think we all had a good time, and it was nice to be out in the world doing activities again.

Just the guys!

All of us together with our strawberry hauls!

Elektra kept sneaking strawberries when no one was looking. We were trynig to limit the number they ate since we were going to lunch right away, but every time her mom wasn’t looking, Elektra would grab another strawberry.

While we were waiting for our table for lunch, the kids played on the playground. It was warm enough that Alex was just in his polar fleece, which created an unbelievable amount of static electricty on the plastic slide.

When they would come down the slide Elektra’s hair would literally stand on end, and they began the game of zapping the adults with the static electricity.

She has such a mischevious smile here, she was really having fun with Alex.

The restaurant has great food, and we’ve been back a couple of times with Simon and Lily since then.

Alex is a terrible influence and created the character Coke the dope using his empty coke can, an orange, and some bottle caps. There was a little song and every time he would say it, Elektra would repeat it. I was sure she’d be repeating it forever.

Alex and Elektra with their Coke the dopes.

One nice thing about the last day of quarantine was packing everything back up and getting ready to go, I hate packing, but this was like the most exciting packing ever. I got to hug my kiddo, who I would swear had grown over those 11 days.

Even leaving the hotel was an adventure. So after you were done with the quarantine and all the testing, you get a green QR code on your phone- this basically says to anyone concerned that you are not carrying covid and are free to move about the country. We were told by people who worked at the University not to leave the hotel without that green code as it is vital to going anywhere, including our next hotel stay. When we checked out of the quarantine hotel, they gave us a bunch of paperwork showing that we had completed everything, but we couldn’t get the app to get our codes working right. And as you can imagine, it was all in Chinese so Vivian and the hotel staff are trying to help and telling us to just go and it will get fixed later. We wouldn’t leave, I was too afraid that it wouldn’t get fixed and we’d be stuck. After probably 10-15 minutes it got figured out and we could finally leave (I’m sure the hotel staff was happy to see us go too)

Another highlight was our good friend Marco was so nice, he came all the way out to pick us up at the hotel (like an hour and change away from home). It was so good to see him after almost a whole year! We all got caught up with news from town and how his family was doing- and we went to his restaurant for dinner that night to get some good food and some good company.

While we were out of official quarantine, the campus had an additional quarantine so we weren’t allowed to go back to our apartment for another 7 days- although there are disagreements about when 7 days starts and ends. So we decided to splurge and stay in our Langham hotel for a couple days and then move to a cheaper hotel for the rest of the week. Alex started back to school as soon as the official quarantine was over since there were only two weeks of school left before Christmas break.

Because we couldn’t get on campus, we also couldn’t get our car, or anything we might have needed from our house (including but not limited to more clothes so I could stop washing everything in the hotel sink). So he and I would get up and take a cab to the bus stop and then I would take another cab back to the hotel. It wasn’t bad since it was so much closer than home, he got to sleep in a bit, and he got a pass on wearing his uniform for a while because the uniforms were all in the apartment.

I will tell you, quarantine does weird things to you, I called my PhD supervisor up a day after quarantine and told her I wanted to quit and just get a master’s degree. Had a complete breakdown on everything, with no real reason- Mark had to talk me over the proverbial ledge and send her a message saying it was an overreaction and that I didn’t really want to quit. I’ve been told this is a normal thing to have happen during the PhD process and the stress of quarantine (and the previous 11 months) just pushed me over the edge.

The cheaper hotel was almost a cruel joke, we moved to the hotel on campus (blocked off so that you couldn’t access the campus from the hotel) where we could see our apartment -and my car- across the street. It was so much worse being so close and so far at the same time.

It was a really long way to get home, and despite everything, that first night back in our apartment, with our things, in our beds… was the best night’s sleep. Because we have cleaning ladies who come in once a week, the worst of the mess that some of our other friends came home to was avoided. The apartment wasn’t too dusty, although the cleaning ladies don’t go in our fridge or anything so there were some pretty gross science experiments in there. There was a pile of laundry that still had Uganda dirt on them because I didn’t get a chance to wash them before we left for Hong Kong.

It was like a time capsule of who we were the day we left for Hong Kong, and super weird to come back to almost a year later. It took a couple days to get settled back into the routine of school from the apartment, just in time for Christmas break to start. We got back into our apartment on the 15th of December, and I got our Christmas tree out of storage and up as soon as possible.

The bus that took us to the long term hotel was going to be the last time I saw the boys for 11 days. When we got to the long term hotel we were told that we would not be able to stay in one room and that we had to keep the same arrangement of rooms that we had at the first hotel, which meant Mark and Alex together and me on my own.

I don’t know how to adequately express how disappointed I was and how nervous I was- I oscillate between being extroverted and introverted, but 11 days on my own by myself with nothing but my own thoughts is a daunting idea. I have had a tiny glimpse of prison and have decided not to murder anyone for fear of solitary confinement in prison.

They even put our rooms on opposite sides of the hotel, although I did share a wall with Vivian. So once we got up stairs, that was it. I didn’t take any pictures of my room, I don’t know why, it’s not like I didn’t have time! It was a bit run down, and a pretty dirty room- I did not walk on the carpet barefoot because it felt dusty. The boys room had candy or gum stuck into the carpet. There was a smallish bathroom, a big bed (the boys’ room had two beds) a little desk, sitting chair and weird end table. When we got into the room, there were big 5 liter jugs of water, meant to last us as drinking water the whole time we were in the hotel. There were also the little hotel shampoos, soaps, slippers, enough for one for each day of confinement. Chopsticks for each meal, more chlorine tablets for the toilet, and thermometers, because at this hotel, we were going to check our own temperature and report it to the health team twice a day.

The first day was fine, by the time we got in and settled I think it was lunch time. There was some confusion because they decided I needed a special diet that was no fish, no salt and something else. Vivian called them up to explain that it was not me, but maybe someone else on our floor, but I still got a couple really bland tasteless meals.

I tried to photograph every meal while we were in quarantine to give you a perspective on why I was not happy. Some meals are better than others, but in the end, I ate an unbelievable amount of rice, since that was the one thing every meal that I was sure I’d like.

This was my view from my room- every available spot of unused land near us is turned into farming by local people. I would watch them tend the plots and try to figure out what the vegetables were.

And sometimes, we even got nice sunsets (although the windows were weirdly tinted).

One thing we decided to do, was we watched movies together as a family, even from other rooms, we’d call each other, say one two three, go and then start the movie at the same time. Perversely, we watched a lot of prison movies, including showing Alex Papillon, No Escape, and I feel like there was another one I’m forgetting. In addition, Alex and Mark were alternating between prison work outs, Mark teaching class, and watching movies. They watched a lot of things to round out Alex’s film education.

We were lucky in that we could get deliveries of fresh fruit, and buy things off of Taobao to have them delivered, we’ve been told that people going through it now aren’t able to do either of those things. I bought myself a giant diamond art painting to work on (that hasn’t been worked on since we left quarantine), and Alex got his Lego Star Wars Advent calendar, which was a count down to Christmas as well as a countdown to getting out of quarantine.

You think to yourself, I can stay at a hotel for two weeks, I’ll get work done, watch some movies, read a book…. I can’t begin to express how much that all goes out the window when you’re in the middle of it. You start counting down until they will bring your next meal, even if you don’t want to eat it, it just gives you something to focus on. I’ve never gone that long without being with Alex, Uganda was the longest before that, but at least that was a good trip with lots to do to keep me distracted.

I’m going to fast forward because I think that’s enough time spent on this, it still bums me out. We had someone on our flight a couple rows ahead of us test positive for covid, so in addition to the regular three tests we were supposed to have, we had to have two extra tests. The tests were not so bad, throat swabs instead of nasal swabs, the throat swabs are very similar to a strep test. The downside was the blood test, I think it was on day 9. The two people who came room to room to draw blood had pre-cut rubber bands to tie around your arm to draw blood, except that they were too short to go around my arm, so they decided to tie it around my forearm to draw the blood.

As this is happening, I’m chatting with Vivian who is hanging outside her door translating for me and the health workers. I’m laughing about tattoos and not being needle shy, and all of a sudden I feel wet dripping on my hand, the needle has come out of my wrist and I am leaking blood everywhere, the poor health care workers didn’t know what to do. Rather than try again, they moved to collect blood on the other wrist. They leave and I go back to my room- but all of a sudden I have this burning itching sensation going from the blood draw point in both directions- up into my palms and into my forearms. I didn’t want to call the health people back (super worried they’d take me to worse quarantine) so I called Mark- I’ve never had a reaction like that to a blood draw before, but I would not recommend it, it was awful! After about an hour it was back to normal, but I had some gnarly bruising to go along with it.

It was one step closer to being done though. Every day the boys would send me a picture of our countdown to freedom calendar, and it made it a little easier to stand.

I tell you all this, knowing that until you do it, it doesn’t quite hit home the same way. And even now, we can’t grasp what people who do the quarantine now have to deal with. It’s up to 35 days in hotel quarantine, and one or two weeks at home depending on where you are- and at last count it was something like 9 tests over the course of the 35 days. I can tell you honestly, I’d rather chew my own arm off than go through that.