Tian Mu Shan

Although we found an apartment right away, we had roughly three weeks before we could move in. We spent the weekdays trying to survive the heat at Esther's parents house in Xiaoshan, and the weekends looking at more apartments in Hangzhou.

Living at her parents was fine for the most part. Muse is living there too, at least for the next few months. It must be a paradise for her. There's an outside patio, four levels to explore, and birds. This actually might be the first time she's seen a bird since she was rescued when she was 3 months old. Nothing else in the world matters to her when she's watching them. She focuses intensely, making a whimpering sound, almost like chirping, as she pines for them. There aren't enough bird-watching hours in the day to satisfy her desire, as far as she's concerned.

There was also the Olympics. It was interesting to watch it from China, rooting for the USA, while the games were on neutral turf. CCTV chooses to use gold medal quantity for ranking country performance, while western media uses overall medal quantity. This meant that for most of the games, China was in first on CCTV, while USA was first on, say, The Huffington Post. It's clearly a bias in favor of whichever side is reporting, but it's true that Chinese place a heavily weighted importance on gold. Even watching with Esther, i could see her elation when a Chinese diver took gold, and her disappointment when a swimmer merely placed second.

One monday, during a particularly bad heat wave, i was told to pack my stuff up, that we're leaving for a mountain retreat called Tian Mu Shan. For about $15 each per day, we got a really nice room and all our meals covered. It was a nice enough place, well kept, and they even had wifi access. I was a little concerned when i spotted a scorpion on the stairs leading to our room, but i never saw another, so i guess it was just leaving?

Tian Mu Shan is popular with the elderly as a place to retreat for the summer months. This was evident twice a day (sunrise and sunset) when they mass-migrated up the hill to the parking lot at the entrance to the mountain.

Does it make me a horrible person that i was reminded of The Walking Dead whenever i watched them slowly lumbering in packs, sauntering off toward an unknown location?

One day i got up a little early to hike the mountain. I was told it would take about 5 hours to hike up and take a bus down. I was back in three. Esther's family was very concerned about me going alone. But as an athletic adult who lived in Colorado for 12 years, i explained i am qualified to hike the paved steps of a popular tourist destination alone.

The hike itself was really nice, for China. The few times i've been hiking around Beijing (the wild wall excluded) you end up hiking with people in business suits, high heels, jeans. This was much better. People were here to enjoy nature.

On my way up, i passed the 50 or so Chinese hikers in the first half. I ended up being alone until the top, even though i stopped for a half hour to take pictures of butterflies.

At the peak, there was a nice Buddhist temple where i rewarded myself with ice cream, a rest in a hammock, and the petting of a puppy, before finding the shuttle bus back to the bottom.

The next day, we went back home and immediately joked that if we left now, we could be back in Tian Mu Shan before dinner. Hangzhou is HOT in July!

~Kevsther

Our Hangzhou Home

Esther and i arrived in Hangzhou on July 15th and started looking at apartments immediately. Over the next three weeks we'd see about 20 places, and it turns out we found our future home on the first day. The family living there wasn't ready to move yet so we had another month to try to find something better, but this place was just too good: a two bedroom/one office/two bathroom end unit with windows on three sides, second floor, 121 sqm, with very nice furnishing and in a good location. This place would be 8000RMB in Beijing, but it's ours for 4500/month in Hangzhou. We even escaped the agent fee by working with the family directly and locked in a flexible two-year lease.

We moved in on August 10th and it's taken about a week to get settled, but it already feels like home. Life in Hangzhou is good. We've got frisbee two days a week, poker every monday, and plenty to keep us busy in between. I've been cooking for often, trying out some dishes her mom cooks, as well as improvising some of my own. My favorite so far is the Organic Cauliflower with Bacon, but the Salmon Spinach Pasta is great too. Our days are spent running errands, setting up the home gym (!) and preparing for parenthood (!!). The treadmill arrives this weekend, and the baby on Oct 21st.

Esther's hospital visits in Xiaoshan have been easy and uneventful, which is good. The last checkup, i'm not exaggerating, would have cost 3RMB, but her insurance covered 2 of it (yaaay!) so she paid 1 RMB.

Hangzhou is still relatively new to me, but i'm figuring it out fast. The free bike system helps a lot. You put down a 200 RMB deposit one time and you can take a bike for 1 hour for free. It's 1 RMB for the second hour, but you can return the bike at any of the bike stations and just grab another one before the hour is up, renewing your free hour. It's all automated. We've got a bike station right outside our apartment, and they are everywhere. The bikes are impressively well-maintained too. Aside from the occasional broken bell or lock, they ride beautifully.

That's it for now... i'll close it out with a random picture of my beautiful wife.

~Kevsther

Two Month Roundup

As you can guess, it's been a busy two months for Kevsther. When i last posted, we were just wrapping up the wedding festivities in Xiaoshan. We returned to Beijing and spent the months of May and June relaxing. No major trips. No agenda. We woke up late, cooked food for ourselves, strolled our new hutong surroundings, enjoyed the mild weather of early summer, played frisbee. There wasn't much to blog about, honestly. We took a few day trips around Beijing.... 798 Art District, Chaoyang Park many times, and spent a lot of time at Great Leap Brewing.

Ok, that place is worth a quick digression. It became my favorite hangout, by far. A mere 5 minute walk from our apartment in Nanlouguxiang, Great Leap Brewing is settled in a lovely hutong courtyard and boasts roughly a dozen of their really fantastic microbrews at any given time. The owner, Carl from Cleveland, and I became quick friends when he needed a fourth for spades one night. After that, we ended up playing 1-2 times a week. For two months, it was my home away from home.

Thus was our life for a while. In June, we headed down south for the Shanghai tournament. Big Brother did very well overall, but we lost in the finals 15-13 in a tough game against Singapore. Esther and i retired to Xiaoshan for a week to lick our wounds. Then, my brother Ray and his daughters Nicole (16) and Katie (14) came out for a ten-day visit. Note: All pictures in this post are taken from their camera.

First off, I LOVE that my nieces were excited to come visit, and not just for shopping at Yashow. I believe travel is so important, especially for Americans. We don't have the luxury of easily crossing a border and experiencing a new culture, language, and people. And i don't think Mexico counts, unless you get out of the tourist cities.

Our itinerary was simple: two nights in Shanghai, three nights in Hangzhou, and four nights in Beijing. Shanghai turned out to be a little underwhelming... big buildings, long distances, inflated prices. To me, Shanghai doesn't really feel like China, but it would be a shame not to spend at least a little time there. the highlights were the French Concession, and a trip to the top 101st floor observation deck of the shanghai world financial center, one of the tallest building in the world.

By contrast, Hangzhou offered the best weather of the three cities and probably the most pleasant sightseeing. The minute they got out of the cab near Hefang Jie, they already liked it more than Shanghai. From a tourist perspective, it's just a more manageable and beautiful city. We partook in all the normal activities Hangzhouvians enjoy, including but not limited to hiking, walking around west lake, taking a boat across west lake, and playing badminton with 85 year old dude.

No joke, after playing volleyball with Nicole and Katie, and beating me at badminton, this guy approached Ray holding some boxing gloves, pantomiming something like, "Don't worry, no hitting the face, just the stomach."

Either you get your ass beat by an 85 year old, or you're picking on an old guy... there's no good ending to that story. Ray politely declined.

On our last day, we went to Esther's parents for lunch. Expecting to be served fish heads, pig knuckles and bugs, they were a little apprehensive. However, i have trained her parents well, and they now know the things a foreigner will and won't eat. Amazing delicious pork stewed for hours in soy sauce? Yes please! Stir-fried cauliflower and bacon? Om nom nom. Boiled soft-shelled turtle that i was just playing with outside? I may have lost my appetite.

That night we took an overnight train to Beijing, and played Rummy pretty much the whole way.

In Beijing, weather was mostly accommodating. We rented bikes and rode around hou hai and through the hutongs. We hiked Jingshan Park and ate at some of our favorite restaurants.

We hiked my favorite section of the wild wall and would have camped, but that was the one day it decided to rain. We ended up getting soaked and muddy, but we still had a cool adventure playing in the clouds.

Ray is an engineer with Life Fitness. He makes exercise equipment. He was pretty amused by the zero-resistance public equipment China puts everywhere.

I also timed their visit to coincide with my wedding reception in Beijing, hosted at Great Leap and catered by Home Plate BBQ. About 50 of our friends showed up looking sharp to wish Esther and I well, as well as enjoy Beijing's best microbrew and pulled pork. My awesome friend Barbara baked us two beautiful wedding cakes.

Nicole later said to me "Kevin, you have the nicest friends." And it's true, my Beijing people's are really special. I think it's something about taking that life-changing plunge into another culture that makes people so interesting and welcoming of others. That, and frisbee players are awesome.

After the Reitz's left, Esther and I made our final preparations to move to Hangzhou. We found a nice family for Maze in Beijing and shipped Muse via Air-mail to Hangzhou. We packed up all our stuff (4 boxes and a bag of baby stuff... gonna have to rewrite that 5-year plan soon) and shipped it as well. We're now living at her parents house but have found a few really nice apartments in Hangzhou. We're pretty close to really getting settled here, so i'll be updating on that shortly.

All in all... life is good.

~Kevsther