YALIs MOM

HAPPY SPRING FESTIVAL 2009 I wanted to share our Spring Festival experiences sooner than later, so am hoping to get a quick blog put together this morning while Ya-Li does her schoolwork. We had heard the area around our campus would more or less shut down for about 4 weeks once we approached the week before the holiday (January 26). But hearing that and seeing it are 2 different things. Upon our return from our trip to southern Yunnan, we were more or less shocked at the transition our neighborhood had undergone from a loud, bustling, crowded mass of students/locals/merchants and cars/buses/vans/trucks/horse-n-carts/bicycles/motorbikes that seemed to cover every square inch of open sidewalk or street to…………nothing. The openings of nearly every vendor store were closed up tight and scarcely a person could be spotted for blocks. WOW! ... read more

So OK, maybe we are in the season to be jolly (OK, now we are actually well past it, but that is when I wrote most of this blog), but since time seems to get away from us here, thought I would post some “ancient history” to fill in what we have been doing. So for this blog, please travel back with us to October……. and pretend it is a time of harvest moons and pumpkins and trick-or-treatin’. Never quite sure what my students know about our holidays in the states, I typically bring the subject up about a week before, and have been greeted with everything from looks of confusion and bewilderment to complete knowledge of the hows, whys, and wherefores. (Perhaps it has to do with whom their Foreign English teacher was last year.) ... read more

So much has happened since our last entry. The days merge from one to the next and all of a sudden more weeks have flown by. We had a wonderful Mid Autumn Festival (Moon Festival) as friends from Alaska, also living here, came to visit with their daughter. As they like to hike about, we took our first "check out the neighborhood" walk since arriving. As you can see from the pictures, we are in an older part of Kunming where "urban renewal" has not yet taken hold. In fact, we awake every morning promptly at 6:30 with the many neighborhood roosters crowing their little hearts out. The little street which goes in front of our school's gate, is narrow, winding, and flanked on both sides by stoned in trenches or waterways which carry the aromatic ... read more

We have finally made it to Kunming. Juneau seems like a very distant memory, but our departure almost didn't happen. Luckily our friends Kathy and Tim helped get us out the door and to the airport with only moments to spare. I will forever be in their dept for making me buck up, focus, and get our suitcases packed. Our flights were on time, and uneventful. Thankfully.  It allowed us to sleep and refresh from close to 3 months of packing our house up.  We flew to Anchorage Friday nite, Aug 22, then took a 4:10 am flight to Taipei, connecting to Hong Kong later that morning, (a day ahead) and finally to Kunming, where we arrived around 2:30 pm Sunday afternoon. We were met at the airport by our school liaison, whom we now call ... read more