September!

Doing my best to get caught up on blogging, so i need to start by rewinding to September. By far the most notable was the Reitz Rents coming to visit.  They stayed in our spare bedroom for a month and joined in Jorkevstherdan's daily routine.  They've been to China twice before so we didn't feel the need for much tourism, which was actually really nice.  We only took one major trip, and that was to Naked Retreats, a beautiful mountain escape about 45 minutes from Hangzhou.

The rad pad:

View from our ridge-top villa balcony.

 The people in the pad:

Another day we went to Xiaoshan to visit Esther's parents. We spent the day at the lake and had dinner with the extended family.

The Reitz Rents and the Esther P's exchanged many smiles and nods and "Hello's" and "Ni hao's" and "Xiexie's" and that was actually about the extent of their conversations.  On this particular occasion, Dad forgot his fork and was forced to struggle with chopsticks.  Esther's family kept watching him, staring, trying to comprehend how someone couldn't effortlessly pick up a single grain of rice.  I asked them all to try using chopsticks with their left hand.  

After they fumbled around and dropped food all over the place for a minute, I explained that's what it's like for people who don't use chopsticks everyday.  

Esther even got a day of vacation when i took the Rents and Jordan to Wuzhen, a traditional water town.

More pictures to come in a day or two... i hope!

~Kev