I have moved house 5 times in my 9 years in China, always fairly local moves. Over the weekend I made my most recent move. Surprisingly there weren’t any hiccups, parlty cos I made got a chu men tiao before moving. This step is easy to miss!
Chinese new year festivities last two weeks. There are a LOT of new year traditions in China, many of which I’ve participated in one year or another. Fireworks, new year dinner, decorations, fireworks, temple fairs, dumplings, and fireworks.
The toffee fruit vendor chatted to the jian bing vendor, saying “Wow! She speaks pu tong hua [standard Mandarin Chinese]. Like my grandson. He can’t speak our dialect. We speak our dialect to him but he doesn’t pick up much.”
While the Gregorian calendar is used in China, the traditional luni-solar calendar has a lot of influence on daily life. All traditional festivals are governed by the yin li. Many Chinese people mark birthdays by the yin li, not the Western calendar.
While I’ve already written about the bad air in Beijing lately, I compared the air quality I recorded in Oct/Nov ’12 with January’s air. I am thankful for my air purifier, but horrified by how this must be affecting an entire generation of Chinese.
Occasionally I meet a driver who has interesting things to say, and a good attitude, so it’s fun to listen. This was one of those times. I don’t share all his opinions but I’m always interested to learn more about another person’s perspective on life.
Beijing’s bad air is now international news. Articles about last weekend’s horrific conditions sprung up all over the place. Yes, it really was that bad. In the past two weeks we had 6 days in the hazardous range, with one day’s average off the scale.
EPIC was a 2.5 day conference – that’s 50 hours to cram in 5 worship sessions, 3 talks and a LOT of activities. There were 100 participants. I led a worship band of boys – they live in four cities, and come from the US, UK, New Zealand, and Korea.
I made a decision a while back to tell stories, not write a newsletter. While there’s room for improvement, I’m getting better at looking around me for stories that others may find interesting – stories that show a little of what life looks like here.
Siem Reap is 6 hours from Phnom Penh, on small two lane roads through rice paddies, wooden stilt houses, palm trees, haystacks, and skinny cows. We stopped to buy snacks – fried tarantulas, bugs, pineapple, green mango with chili salt.
Moganshan is a mountain resort area near Hangzhou. It was settled by missionaries in the late 1800s as a retreat from the hot, humid Shanghai weather. Wealthy foreigners built sprawling houses with tennis courts and swimming pools.
We were put on buses and taken around the corner to an airport hotel for the night. We showed ID and gave our boarding passes in exchange for room keys. Later a woman came knocking on doors to call us down to the cafeteria for dinner.
Stories From Tanya 