Down time

Well, our Kiwi friends have all departed. We had a wonderful 10 days together and can't wait for them to come back again. More on their visit hopefully soon...

We leave Monday for Xi'an, China and then Tuesday we will head to Hong Kong. Hopefully there will be no problems with the flights, as the New Zealanders had quite a lot of trouble with theirs.

And I also hope that the internet is working a lot better in Hong Kong and Thailand then it is up here in Xining. It is maddening. Anybody currently trying to send us email please know that it might not be received for quite a while. I found a great article explaining what it has been like for all of us China netizens. Check it out for a laugh.

Our old laptop finally died. I needed it to last just one more week so that I could transfer all our docs to the new laptop before we travel, but of course it didn't make it. So I took the hard drive out to put it in our portable hard drive case. I was able to get most of the data over, including our Outlook files, but some of it seems corrupted somehow. Another task to waste time on...

It was great having a team here in January, although a little cold. Normally we are just waiting to be able to go south for warmer weather, but this year we were very busy. Perhaps we should schedule visitors every year in Jan.

Mid-January Already

Well, internet traffic is still sporadic at best. If you can manage to stay up late enough it gets better early in the morning, but it's not worth it. I had planned to post a video from Christmas morning with the kids opening packages and other pics from Christmas, but it just doesn't feel right anymore...

We will be busy the next 10 days or so because we will be hosting several friends from New Zealand, including our business partner. We have many exciting things set up to do, including some English teaching and sight-seeing. But the main thing is that we are hosting a seminar out in one of the counties on how to start a small business. We are excited because we hear that over 100 people are interested in attending.

Shortly after they leave we will be heading out of the country for vacation and seminars. We will try to blog when we can.

This picture is from Christmas day... It is a tradition here in Xining for all of the expats to go to the park on Christmas afternoon to skate and sled. This year they had drained the lake in the park so we had to go to the river. Here in Xining they have these chairs on rails that you can rent along with mini-ski poles so you can slide around on the ice. It's a lot of fun and we have never missed a year. This year some friends loaned us skates so Ellie and Sara both tried ice skating for the first time as well. Though I think it was difficult enough for them that it won't happen again anytime soon.

Internet trouble

Sorry for the lack of posts lately... The earthquake in Taiwan has really messed up the internet traffic all over Asia - even in northwest China. It's been difficult to check email, surf the web, chat on Skype, or anything else. They say that it will take up to 3 weeks to get service back to where it was, but that it will get a little better each day. Hopefully "they" are right. Then we will be able to post Christmas pics and other fun stuff.

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season...