Eating Cake with Chopsticks
The birthday celebrations continued this weekend with a dinner last night with the Wu Family, we all put on our sweatpants [Wu wears sweatpants cuz his belly won’t fit in a whole lot else] and headed out to the local restaurant to have dinner. When someone has a “special” dinner in China, you get a separate room to eat in, which is rather creepy because there is no music, nothing to look at, just you and your friends in the small room. The food was good and I got to take some chicken home which I just enjoyed as a late afternoon snack at work. Once we got back to the Wu house, Wu and Yang Ling arrived with a cake! Yeah for my birthday cake! There are photos of the event on snapfish.com, I will email all of you [hopefully everyone] so you can check them out. If you don’t get the email, let me know so I can send the link to you. There are also photos of folks in boulder, Mexico vacation, for your browsing pleasure, on snapfish. I also got a pink bracelet from Wu Xia so I am looking quite stylish.
On Saturday I got off my lazy and increasingly large butt and joined the MOBsters [mountain bikers of Beijing] for their second ride of the season. I met them at 8 am the Agricultural Hall’s parking lot and we put all of our bikes into our bus and headed up to the Ming Tombs, only about an hour from Beijing. There were 9 of us, one woman who was Chinese, the rest were non-American whitey men. The riding was great, but a bit of an ass-kicker for those of us not in shape! [AKA me]. The guys were great, helping me carrying my [very heavy] bike through the boulder fields. We rode up a mountain, down the mountain [very cold]. Up the next mountain, down the mountain [again hands were frozen]. It was a great way to see the countryside, to see the faces of the people up there. As I approached someone on the road their faces had a look of: disgust, fear, scowl, a grimace, but then after I say a friendly “ni hao” their faces light up and they have the biggest smile, their sun wrinkled country faces beamed at me. We stopped and had a snack with two women who were fire wardens in the mountains, which means they basically sit on the side of the road and do really nothing all day, I guess until someone starts smoking in the mountains and they attack! They were super nice, and took our photo. The scene of watching the country bumpkin try to work a digital camera was priceless. My new bike performed well, aside from its heavy-ness, but we all decided it was a good deal for the money. In the end I rode 25 miles!!! And I felt it the next day. And today too. A jump start to my spring work out.
My job has made progress, we had a meeting today and decided that I would research and compile a healthcare review for the year 2004 for China’s OTC market, and then do the same for the beginning of this year, and then send out monthly newsflash emails. Quite a major task, but I think it could be both interesting and feasible. And I am MORE THAN happy to have a goal, something to work towards, here at my little office. Aside from that, the weather is warm, the kitties are cuddly, and the friends plentiful!
On Saturday I got off my lazy and increasingly large butt and joined the MOBsters [mountain bikers of Beijing] for their second ride of the season. I met them at 8 am the Agricultural Hall’s parking lot and we put all of our bikes into our bus and headed up to the Ming Tombs, only about an hour from Beijing. There were 9 of us, one woman who was Chinese, the rest were non-American whitey men. The riding was great, but a bit of an ass-kicker for those of us not in shape! [AKA me]. The guys were great, helping me carrying my [very heavy] bike through the boulder fields. We rode up a mountain, down the mountain [very cold]. Up the next mountain, down the mountain [again hands were frozen]. It was a great way to see the countryside, to see the faces of the people up there. As I approached someone on the road their faces had a look of: disgust, fear, scowl, a grimace, but then after I say a friendly “ni hao” their faces light up and they have the biggest smile, their sun wrinkled country faces beamed at me. We stopped and had a snack with two women who were fire wardens in the mountains, which means they basically sit on the side of the road and do really nothing all day, I guess until someone starts smoking in the mountains and they attack! They were super nice, and took our photo. The scene of watching the country bumpkin try to work a digital camera was priceless. My new bike performed well, aside from its heavy-ness, but we all decided it was a good deal for the money. In the end I rode 25 miles!!! And I felt it the next day. And today too. A jump start to my spring work out.
My job has made progress, we had a meeting today and decided that I would research and compile a healthcare review for the year 2004 for China’s OTC market, and then do the same for the beginning of this year, and then send out monthly newsflash emails. Quite a major task, but I think it could be both interesting and feasible. And I am MORE THAN happy to have a goal, something to work towards, here at my little office. Aside from that, the weather is warm, the kitties are cuddly, and the friends plentiful!
posted by Claire at 5:44 AM
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