The Big Birthday

Birthday's are no small affair in this house. In fact, my birthday just two weeks ago was a "surprise" that as E told me to hide in my room meant they were preparing the dining room.  The surprise was more for the kids than for me and the smiles on their small, nearly identical faces meant more than than anything else...cake is hard to eat on a hangover (more about that later).

More Than One Misnomer

You know there's no Facebook in China and for that matter, no Twitter and well they all ride bikes and there's no foreign news...right? China, naturally is still closed to the "Western" ways of the world. And if you believed all of this, you couldn't be more wrong.

A Bit of Ingenuity

Some people just assume that women my age can't cook or that we do take away meals or some sort of nonsense. More and more I find that in my years spent living abroad I learned how to cook "outside of the box" because necessity is the mother of invention and induction.

The Things People Say

About 7 years ago someone told me and my husband that our lives were about to change and said with a hint of sarcasm that life would never be the same again.  Granted we were about to become parents for the first time and honestly had no idea what we were getting ourselves into but what we were about to discover is that our lives were going to be less ordinary.

Adjustment in Reverse

If there are some things that seem a given when moving to China you may not expect the same those same things as a given when returning to your home country.

You Think They Have Good Chinese Food Here?

There was what I can only imagine was a take out menu on the table this afternoon for a Chinese restaurant in town.  Being curious by nature I took a gander at it and decided that it was not Chinese food, more Asian food with variety of menu items from around Asia...so not Chinese food as advertised.  Okay no problem, I would find good Chinese food. 

Hey Beanpole...Listen Up!

The other day I sent my former boss and friend a link to a new app that alerts residents of Beijing to changes in air quality.  He wrote back "we are all gonna die" to which I replied "that's a guarantee" and then rambled on a bit about the trade-offs involved in living here where I can smell everything and living there where I can't smell anything, after all where ever it is you make your home their are positives and negatives.