Put this on your bucket list NOW

We have 360 degrees of fireworks in our neighborhood right now. It absolutely non-stop everywhere you look and this is just what you can buy at the corner store! Our hearts were just pounding! Just had 1st slight lull 40 minutes in. This video is just the view from our inn's rooftop. One of the most amazing things we've ever seen! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Happy New Year, Again!

Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year) starts on Monday and Jiangyin is already becoming a ghost town as people start the mass exodus out of town to see their families. We're jumping on the bandwagon tomorrow as we make our first trip to Beijing and then continue on to South Korea courtesy of our 30 day visas. We'll be in Beijing for 4 days, staying at a hutong inn which should give us a glimpse of "Old Beijing." All the usual tourist suspects are on our list--the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall (hopefully covered in snow?!), eating Peking duck, scouring the famous Dirt Market trying to discern trinkets from treasures, ice skating at Shichahai, seeing a traditional Peking Opera performance, and of course, the Beijing Museum of Tap Water. Phew! I'm sure there's no way we'll squeeze it all in!

Then we're off to South Korea to... I actually don't know where! We're flying to Busan because it is the cheapest flight out of the country we could find. But our best friends here in Jiangyin are actually from a city near Busan and happen to be home on their vacation. So it works out perfectly for us to stay with them for two days and get the official insider's tour. I can't wait!

So "Xinnian Kuaile!" and I'll see you all in the New Year! (Which I learned last night at our Chinese lesson, means I'm soon to be 33! ouch! But as soon as I'm south of the Yangtze I'll be 32, which is a little better, yet so strange!)

Fingers crossed for snow!

A room with a view!

Hong Kong is the land of very expensive, teeny, tiny hotel rooms. Since it was our anniversary, we went all out and did this trip for free! Thank you CSL for the flight and our credit card points for the room! Upon checking in, we mentioned it was our anniversary in hopes of a room upgrade. And lucky us, we got a 10'x10' corner room with a view!

No, not that view.....

This one! Now that's more like it! Hubba hubby!

We were sorely disappointed by the New Year's festivities in Hong Kong. The fireworks were absolutely pathetic. Actually we were both slightly disappointed by HK in general. We expected a sleek British/Asian version of New York, but found it to be fairly worn down, cramped, and not that enticing. Based on friends' rave reviews of Hong Kong, we walked around all weekend saying "I like Shanghai better. What's wrong with us? Are we missing something?" So I guess it is a good thing we're only a bus ride away from Shanghai and not living in HK!

In spite of it, we walked all over that (very hilly!) city and feel like we packed quite a bit in to two days. We drooled over the beautiful grocery stores but didn't buy anything because of the horrifying prices, then were equally amazed by the cheap $0.50 ferry ride from Hong Kong to Kowloon, where we then paid a staggering $70 for dim sum (this would be about $10-15 in our town!).

Bustling, odor-free market right outside our hotel

The view of HK from Kowloon

thought the lone sparkler was more festive than the actual show....

That's as exciting as it got....

New Year's Day we caught the tail end of a dragon dance in a local park.

We wandered thru the financial center of HK over to Lan Kwai Fong and SoHo, the two concentrated expat neighborhoods for a "home cooked" meal.

SoHo is so hilly they have outdoor escalators everywhere!

Even though HK wasn't our favorite, we now know what to expect and look forward to returning on one of our many visa-prompted trips. We didn't bother to go to the Peak because of the smog, nor did we make it to any of the jade, antique, food or night markets, which we definitely want to do. Other highlights include sane drivers, cheap, cheap public transportation, drivers that don't honk every second and not being stared at incessantly. It's all about the little things!

Happy New Year!

So we've totally lucked out with our new visas, in that we now have to leave China every 30 days. So we're off too Hong Kong for a complimentary anniversary/New Year's trip! We can both hardly believe we've only been married two years. So many exciting things have happened, it seems like an eternity ago!

Where we'll be in just a few short hours!

1 Year Ago--New Year's in Bonaire, a final family hurrah before the move to China

Just 2 Years Ago, the best start to a New Year EVER.

A BYOO Christmas

So, after a wonderful month in the States and a busy month of Christmas cooking and covert elfing, I'm back to bring you up to date! I'm going to skip ahead to Christmas and fill in the blanks as time allows. 

Five other expats joined us for a Korean-Scottish-English-Canadian-American Christmas in China at our place. Naturally, it started with an adventure--after opening gifts I went to start the stuffing only to realize we didn't have gas or hot water. A few phone calls later and we luckily got the meter reset so we were back in business. Then we realized our turkey had yet to be cleaned. True, the intestines and stomach were gone but it still proved to be a treasure trove of surprises!

Brian's Christmas quote of the year: "It's as if it's giving birth to itself!"

Our Christmas was a BYOO affair. Bring Your Own Oven. Since our ovens are all tiny things that can only hold one dish at a time we needed three to pull this meal off! And thank goodness one of our friends has the biggest oven you can find here--it was just big enough for the turkey. It came with a roasting pan that slides in the oven in place of a rack. But here's where the fun begins. The roasting pan is only wide enough for a hair's width of overlap on the tracks. So when you add a 12lb turkey, the weight of it is enough to sag the pan and send it crashing straight down on top of the element. After repeating this comedy of errors multiple times we ended up putting a mixing bowl on the bottom of the oven between the elements and just set the pan on the bowl. Well, transferring the weight to the bowl made the bottom of the oven pop off, so then we had to shim that back into place as best we could. We were estimating 3 hours cooking time and it was looking pretty darn good around that time. So we took it out, but realized it wasn't ready yet. So back in it goes and we're checking it every 15 minutes or so. About 45 minutes in the internal temp still hasn't risen and we're commenting that we must have maxed out the oven, because it is now cold. Turns out we never turned it back on. Oops! So another 30 minutes more in an oven that's actually ON, and we had a juicy, delicious bird! Phew!

Sewing up the bird China-style, with a quilting needle and yarn.

How I spent my days the last 3 weeks

All in all, I couldn't have imagined a better Christmas in China.

Happy Halloween!