China Take 2 - Update #4

 December 21, 2022

Hi folks - Happy Winter Solstice :) a long overdue update from me here in China....again, it has been a challenging 6 months since getting back....but I only have six more to go....and if you have been paying attention to the news coming out of here, "the times....they are a changin'".....it has been a ridiculous six months here in China....i was online again for the last month and had been getting tested literally every day...yes....we were still being tested for covid...most folks have moved on...but for the past 8 weeks or so, things were out of hand concerning covid....and in the end, it has come to china anyway.... has people wondering what the past 2.5 years of strict regulations were for....especially since beijing did a complete about-face on how they are handling it....now it's every person for themselves.....just insane and extremely disappointing....

i have now tested positive and have made it through my covid fog....i had a super bad headache, a stuffed-up nose and lost my sense of smell, but not all of my sense of taste....which was uber weird....but i have come out on the other side.....the strain here in china is one of the omicron ones and is extremely "catchy", so it is flying through beijing.....it has been a ghost town for the past 2 weeks or so, but today things were coming back...our school has had more than 50% of our community test positive and luckily many had it before we went on winter break....including me....so for the first time in three years, i will be outside of beijing for xmas....i am heading to chengdu on a food tour and to see the pandas....we may even have quarantine dropped coming from international destinations in the near future....which is extremely hard to process...it has been a weird 2.5 years, filled with rules and regulations, and there was not a good end game here for this mess, but i am glad china may now be moving on like the rest of the world.....

this will be my last school year here in beijing....it has not really been a good placement for me...and a bunch of that is due to covid....so i am moving on....and next school year i will be in a new location....paris, france!!! at the american school of paris!!!! i am really excited about this turn of events and this next step....it is a good school, i will be teaching middle school science per normal and i will be able to get back home much more easily!!!! and i can travel all over europe and see friends living there...its a win-win-win!!! and i will be living in paris, france!!!!! 

so the following pictures are from my past six months here in china....from when i arrived and had to do another ten-day quarantine...which was actually harder than the 14 day one i did two years prior...mainly because i knew what the rest of the world was experiencing and how nothing at that point had changed for china....plus, some other experiences i have had here in beijing since arriving....i am soooo excited to leave the city and see somewhere else in china...and the promise of possibly being able to travel outside of china is fabulous....but i will believe it when i see it....i have around 6 months left here in china and do hope i get to see some of the last places on my list....because when i leave this time, i do not expect to ever return....you never know....but it is not in my plan....on with the pictures :)

this is me on my way back to china after being in the states for the summer...i was extremely cautious while there because if i tested positive in the states, it would have made getting back to china 10x more difficult than it already was...i learned a new trick for this trip...bring starbucks gift cards for flight attendants and people who check you in...it will make their day and might get you a perk or two ;)

and then i was back into quarantine in shanghai....10 days this time...no say in where you stay...i got lucky again...good sized room overlooking where the sun went down and no carpet....the quarantine hotels at this point are completely trashed inside....when you exit, they spray them down with bleach for the next person....its actually quite gross and i am glad i will not be doing it again here in china....knock on wood.

at least i had a nice view of the sunset...overlooking a school...where little kids would come out every day to play....so that kind of broke up the monotony....kind of....

this is not my picture....but sums up quarantine quite well....3 square meals, vegetarian in my case, every day...like clockwork....which you end up paying for....you also have to pay for the room....luckily my school helped with the room....but not the food...that was all mine ;)

this is me and my friend sandy getting out on our last quarantine day....we flew over to china from the states together and went through the craziness to get back and both of us have decided this will be our last year in china....she was at least down the road from her place in shanghai....i still had to get back to beijing....crazy times....

can you tell this was my first beer in beijing??? you better believe it....even though there is no one else in the picture...at this point, people were sometimes wearing masks, sometimes not....this got worse and worse as time moved forward...until the last 8 weeks when things here were extremely regulated and rather insane....

one of the things i love about china is the food...and i have found a vegan group here that has a chinese chef teach us how to make vegan/vegetarian food....this is the way into his house/cooking classroom....his location is down in the hutongs, which is one aspect of beijing i love to visit....they are mostly all chinee communities with shared bathroom facilities and cooking courtyards....a lot have been transformed, but if you are looking for old world beijing....this is where you go :)

this was one of the first days i was finally allowed back on campus...had to wait 7 days after arriving in beijing....after doing a ten-day quarantine in shanghai....just crazy....i have a picture of a friend's roasted almonds and cashews with the entrance gate to the middle school...these added a bit of taste to my quarantine and figured i would help with marketing too :)

my first day of school t-shirt this year....at this point i have 25 science t-shirts i rotate through for school....i can wear one every day....and the kids know that i am a total science geek....they can always tell from the t-shirts and my shoes and socks, which many times have science themes as well....go science!!!!

if you have not been to china in the past 7 years or so, you have missed the wave of the delivery person....these little carts are specific to my housing compound....and people get packages every day....you can also send a cup of flour to a friend using this....its wild...if you did not want to ever leave your house....in china, you could do that....my neighbors get at least 5 packages a day here....taobao has changed the face, delivery and shopping of china....

for the autumn festival here in china (october)....we have a golden week and the big food stuff during that time is mooncakes....i have to say i am not a huge fan of these, but this year decided to take a mooncake-making course with my friend sara.....these were sweet ones....and actually did not taste bad at all....

this is what they look like once cooked....and they are filled with chestnut paste or black sesame paste or hawthorn apple paste or citrus paste, etc....it was fun to learn the history associated with mooncakes and to learn to make my own....

i think this was my best one :)

this is the main skyline of beijing....this city is enormous...and extends outward for hours....there are big buildings, but none of them, except in this specific area, are skyscrapers like in shanghai....i have said that shanghai is tall in buildings, while beijing is wide....but the main building you see in front of you that is bent, is nicknamed the "pants" building...and is the CCTV tower here....the tall one behind is the financial tower...and both are located in the CBD (central business district)

this statue is on my school's campus...it is of confucius....and one of the kids made sure to help him mask up....this was and currently still is a daily existence here in china....i still have not taught a class in person without a mask, since march 2020....crazy.....

this is most of my science team....we were out celebrating my birthday...at the local pizza place next to school....i never really had detroit pizza before this place...but it sure is tasty :)

i also had a great brunch with friends for my birthday....did a night stay-cation at a swanky hotel in the city as well...it was a great weekend :)

one of the things i have been doing quite a lot of is stay-cations....and the great wall is actually still in the borders of beijing....so we could rent swanky villas for holidays/weekends and go with a bunch of friends out by the wall...this is a view of the wall from one of those stay-cations....

this was the courtyard with the wading pool of one of those places we did for a weekend...

one aspect of beijing that i really do love is the art complex known as 798....this area reminds me so much of gasworks in seattle or the stax in bethlehem...but dwarfs them both in size...this is one of the places where manufacturing used to happen in beijing....before it was moved outside of the city....so they have taken this area and made it all art - galleries and sculptures and murals...you never can be sure what you will find...like this igloo with some penguins....too funny....

i also love moon gates....no matter when i am out, when i see one, i always take this shot....sometimes my hands can actually touch both sides....they remind me of hobbit houses and in chinese architecture, they signify birth and renewal

these are some of the pipes and manufacturing aspects of buildings left behind that you can find in the 798 art zone....just a fun place to wander around....

fall is a beautiful time of year in beijing....we have a huge change of the color of the leaves and 798 has some great walls with ivy on them that change with the seasons....

at school we have a lovely chinese garden that i walk through every day....i call these statues the three wise men...which is probably not who they are...maybe old scholars....but i love this pathway i take every day to my classroom....

this year for halloween, the math and science departments dressed up as men in black...here we are in the peace park....my science team is a terrific bunch of folks and i have really enjoyed working with them these past 2.5 years....

this was another stay-cation home....this one had an amazing fireplace and overlooked a different section of the wall....

the house was called the sleeping buddha...and if you look at the mountain above, where the wall is, you should be able to see the sleeping buddha's forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and slight chin...we had amazing weather, but at this point, due to the covid situation, the wall was closed to visitors....

here is me and the sleeping buddha enjoying some of the sunshine...it was a "bluebird Beijing Day"!! we actually have a lot of these days...pollution is usually bad for about 20-40 days a year in beijing...much different the past....we also get sand storms from the gobi desert and those can be nasty...but i had them in ghana as well...from the sahara....

this was another vegan cooking day...sichuan food (what i am actually having for my xmas food tour this break!) it was an amazing array of food...and i love how mushrooms are used in most dishes as a meat substitue...and there are sooooooooo many kinds here in china....

as things got crazier and crazier here with covid and they started telling people to stay home from work and school....and then as folks all started becoming positive....some businesses took matters into their own hands... the store is in the second floor apartment....there is a buzzer on top of the white poster and the basket is hanging down to take your money and give you your product...it had a QR code on it as well...as no one here uses cash these days....you pay for everything with your phone...it is going to be hard to remember for carry a wallet again ;P  we thinnk they were selling lottery tickets and small household items....

someone previously asked me to share a picture of the building i live in....this is two of the four buildings in my complex from our front courtyard...my apartment is on the other side and looks out over the street and towards the downtown section of beijing....i really do like my apartment....which is good because i have spent a lot of time there myself over the past 8 weeks....

this is how i enter school every day....we'll see what happens when we return from break....but i had to walk through a shipping container, where my temperature was measured everyday...i also had to scan a code to show i had been tested the day before and was negative.....i have no idea what will happen with all of this equipment now that caution has been thrown to the wind....

this is my walk to where my classroom is...i took this shot while we were online and i was still allowed to go to school to teach online...it helped me keep a routine and some other folks were there most days, so i had some social interaction, which was good for my mental state :)

this is the view across the peace park, towards the middle school building...it was super weird once again, to not have folks on campus...most folks could not get here because at this point they were still locking down compounds....crazy to think all of these restrictions have flown out the window...i guess it now makes a good story???? maybe when i am more removed from it....

the seven days of testing positive for covid....we now have access to the home tests....something that was not available in china for the past few years....this is how most people test now....just like the rest of the world...no more testing for the health kit or checking the green arrow....its a whole new world....

my last shot is a celebration for my new post in paris....at the american school of paris....this was after i siugned my intent letter and really had made my decision....i am soooooooo excited for this move :)

so there you have it....pics and stories from my past six months in china....i am so hopeful that my last six months are much different and i actually might get to leave the country for a trip to another place in southeast asia and get to see the few remaining sites here in china i want to see....we'll see...i don't really trust the changes until they happen and have been around for a month or so....but my fingers are crossed....

i hope each of you has a wonderful solstice - its winter here in beijing...and cold (-10C this morning)....and a very happy holiday season with family and friends wherever you might be....i am hopeful that 2023 will be an amazing year of change and freedom....and my international life will return to a more similar way of life i used to have pre-covid....drop a line and say hello and let me know how you are doing!!!!

peace out.....dani

China Take 2 - States Review

 August 1, 2022

hi all....i am getting in touch from my mom's place in the US.....i have been here for my summer break....it was a stressful trip to get here, and it is proving to be a stressful trip to get back to china for another year of teaching....due to all of this stress, I will be finishing my contract in china this year and then not returning....."where will I go?" you ask...."your guess is as good as mine", I respond :) 

I do not know if it is time for another teaching break, as this teaching gig I have had in china has been ok, not awesome....some great things about the school, some not so much....i do have great science colleagues and am glad I will get to work with them one more year....but china's stance on zero covid has shadowed everything about this post....from school, to life, to china....so it might be time for a break.....again....

the month I have spent in the states has been restful and restorative...just what was needed by me....so that is a great thing....i have enjoyed seeing some people (although not many due to trying to stay negative), going to the jersey shore for a few days (eating my favorite pizza), daily walking in nature and reading, reading, reading.....i have taken a complete break from school....which was necessary.....but now I am getting ready to return, as long as this flight I am scheduled to take does not get suspended like my last flight.....keep those fingers crossed that this will happen....

i will include one or two pictures here from my trip to the states...plus, some pictures from last summer....because I never did a real update for my trip to Yunnan province....which was one of the best trips I have taken in china....ever!!!! i was on a food tour with folks i knew and folks i now consider my friends...it was amazing....pictures will be below.....

thanks to all of those who checked in with me in February, when i wrote a short update about my frustrating times in china.....now that i have been outside of the country, i am in a much better space about returning and finishing my contract....i just needed to reset my china filter.....i am hopeful that i will be allowed to at least travel IN china this year....people did that over the summer, but we'll see what happens during the school year....they will not change their zero-tolerance covid stance, so i am not really expecting there to be much different from last year in the upcoming year...but i will do my job and then leave on good terms, i hope :) on with the pictures....enjoy & as always, feel free to contact me to say hi or ask questions.....happy summer/winter :)

we started our food tour in Dali, a town in the Yunnan Province of China.....there were lots of fresh food markets along the way and I was so excited to see mangosteen for sale...plus, I loved the way this woman measured my fruit to determine how much I owed her...if you have not mangosteen...you should...it is amazing (nothing like mango by the way)!

this food dish was for 7 people....it was humongous and we did not finish it...you ate the things on this tray with your hands and would take some of the rice and eat it together....there were mushrooms and tofu and peanuts and noodles and three kinds of rice and fresh veggies....and much more...it was a ridiculous amount of food and so very tasty!!!! we knew at that point that this trip was going to be amazing!!!!

we did a breakfast tour the next morning and went to a special coffee shop in dali....where we had yunnan coffee as a pour over....the barista was a pro and made an incredible cup of joe 😀 the town was quite cute and I really liked this wall of one of the buildings.....

from dali we traveled around the lake it was on, Erhai Lake, to a farm to go make rose pastry....this is a delicacy of the area, and yes, it is made with rose petals.....i had a small amount, but one of the secret ingredients of the pastry was lard....not really something I eat....i of course had to taste it though...the farm was our first glimpse into the phenomenon of selfies in china....most tourist places or places trying to attract tourists, have now set up tableaux to take your selfie with....the a-frame you see above is one of those places.....but the scenery here was spectacular, so I can understand why they do it....

here is another view from the farm...the mountains are the cangshan mountains to the west of the lake...it was a spectacular day and we came to realize that the scenery in the yunnan province is simply amazing!!!

the next town we stayed in, just north of dali, but on the same lake, was xizhou...this town was quaint and filled with amazing food, especially xizhou baba - which is a bread you have with breakfast, plus it had a famous cultural center....this town was populated by the Bai people, another group within china....this was the view over the rice paddies from the cultural center....wow!!!

this is a drawing of the famous Bai round building in the middle of this town, along with the character for double happiness, used when discussing love & marriage....it was everywhere in this town :)

as we were wandering around xizhou, after our incredible dinner, we ran into this woman...she of course asked us if we had eaten, as is customary in china....most people ask that before they even say hello....it is a way to be gracious and to ask how someone is doing....she had so many textiles and was quite a lovely lady.....

this is what the buildings looked like in the center of xizhou....you will always see the color red in towns, because red is the lucky color of all of china....

in order to leave xizhou, we had to cross this bridge...this is called a moon bridge, and is used by pedestrians only....they can have one, three, five, etc, half moons to cross over....never an even number...the reflection of the sky in the water was just perfect....you can see my friend shannon walking over the bridge...

from xizhou we went on a bike ride around part of erhai lake...it was an amazing day, as you can see from the picture.....this was a place I stopped and chilled for a bit because of the wild flowers, clouds and the mountains...i loved it....

our next stop was a place where we did indigo tye-dying of batik....we each were able to make our own kerchief.... this older woman was intrigued by me and my hips....she did not speak any english, but made it a point to poke me in the hips....so of course I had to take a picture with her....her embroidery on the pieces of batik was incredible....you can see some of the batik behind us.....

from making batik we headed off to shaaxi ancient town....most of the town has been refurbished and they are building a huge highway to get there easily.....i am glad we were there before that happened, because that will increase Chinese tourism one hundred-fold....shaaxi was a huge trading hub on the yunnan-tibet tea horse road....its main plaza had this incredible open-air theater....nothing was being performed, but the structure was beautiful....this town was known for all of the coffee places...so we enjoyed some yunnan coffee while here....

here is another one of the moon bridges to get in and out of shaaxi ancient town....the name of this bridge is the jade ford bridge....i am not sure why....

on our way out of shaaxi, we visited a library in the next town over....it was a bit random and had been built by a foundation...not really sure why they chose this town to build it in, but it was definitely a lovely library....

from shaaxi we headed to tiger leaping gorge....i was soooooo excited about this part of the trip, mainly for the place we were spending the night....it was in the gorge, with an amazing view....BUT unfortunately we were not allowed in the gorge (my friends shannon, josh and myself), because of somewhere we had traveled to previously, that was having a covid outbreak...luckily we were able to go to a hospital and get negative covid tests to see the gorge, but we were not able to get the results in time to be able to spend the night in the gorge....damn covid 😒

at least we were able to get to see the gorge...and it was crazy how much water was rushing past in the gorge...it was rainy and that increased the amount even more than normal...it was wild....

many places in china, like tiger leaping gorge, the Chinese will write wishes and prayers and dreams on these tags and hang them up so they will happen...i thought this was a great way to frame the river.....

they also had created these metallic wings in the tourist area for selfie shots...you can see the gorge better behind me in this shot...

the last stop on this tour was lijiang....the craziest thing we kept experiencing in these small towns in yunnan was all of the over-sized stuffed teddy bears....they were everywhere....you can see a bunch of them in this picture....who knows why????

while in liajiang we visited the largest local market and then went to cook some yunnan food that was famous in the area...here you can see some of the local vegetables....all very tasty, except the bumpy one on the right....this is bitter gourd....to this day I do not know how to make this taste good....soooooooo bitter 😂

I felt I needed to show the meat section of the market....here I am with some pork ribs....not something I would eat, but others on the tour did have the meat and fish along the way....my tour was vegetarian.. although I did taste some of the fish that were native to erhai lake and when they were the main dish of the houses we ate at....

i loved this picture of the women discussing the topics of the world...sisters??? friends??? relatives??? neighbors??? who knows....but I love their hats and that they did not pay the crazy foreigners any mind while discussing the stories of the world 😊

this is where we had a cooking class....with a woman named fancy....here I have a dessert that is composed of shaved ice, milk, fruit and sugar....very tasty....and she was a great instructor...we all really enjoyed the time with fancy 😋

this was the restaurant where we had our last night's meal in liajiang....again - lots of red lanterns for luck...the meal was super tasty and we were really sad the tour was coming to an end....if you are in china...the name of the tour group is the lost plate...it was incredible and if I get a chance to do another with them before I leave china, I feel that would be super lucky 

here is a shot of our entire crew.....these folks made this tour amazing....and it was so much fun sharing the different meals and many of us ended up in the same book club...such good folks 

we made it!!!!! josh, shannon and I made it to tiger leaping gorge after all of the covid testing stress....it was an amazing visit....just to see the raw force of nature and the water going through this gorge...i will miss these folks in china this coming year and feel very lucky to have gotten 18 months with them in Beijing....

this is a shot from my mom's birthday and the main reason I came back to the states for the summer...we had a great time celebrating my mom....happy birthday!!!!

where I live in Pennsylvania gives us pretty amazing sunsets....i watched many of them from my mom's place where much of my time was spent.....thanks for a restful and rejuvenating summer...i think it has been just the right amount for me to make through another year 😉

and it wouldn't be a post without me and beer....this is a beer from one of the brew pubs in Beijing I go to - jing-a - they have been in Beijing quite a while....this beer is one of their spring specialties - hawthorne sour - it was quite tasty....

so there you have it...my trip from last summer and a few pictures from my trip to the states this summer...again, I apologize for not sending this before, but it was a challenge for me to stay in one city for almost an entire year....it made it even more challenging to want to write this blog....i am hopeful I will at least see a bit more of china in the coming year, but am not sure I will get the chance.....fingers crossed

i hope you all have a lovely rest of your summer/winter....and keep those fingers crossed that my flight goes next week and that I am on it....hoping to not get covid between then and now.....remember to reach out if you have questions or just want to say hi!!!!

thanks for reading and have a fab day 😀😀

dani