These are just the trees on our block.
Month: April 2015
Easter
4/4/15
The Primary had an Easter activity.
4/5/15
Hunting for Eggs on Sunday around the apartment. He’s looking at a list telling him which eggs are for him to find. Funny thing, it’s not colors or pictures, but words, so the list is unreadable to him.
We also didn’t have baskets so he used this Thomas backpack. He’s been wearing it, backwards and full of eggs, all week.
I failed to get a picture of the kids all dressed up. It wasn’t anything special anyway. We didn’t have baskets. Thankfully, the Primary activity supplied us with eggs and we stuffed them with tiny Dove bars, snack sized Snickers, Skittles and sour gummy worms.
Tie Dying
PS’s church Young Women’s activity this week (4/7) was tie dying t-shirts at the young women’s leader’s apartment. The shirts all turned out great and everyone had a fun time. One yw was out of town (-1), the leader’s niece was visiting (+1) and there are three leaders (-3). So, only three of these are actual young women in our branch. Actually, the two branches are combined (-1), so only two of them are yw in our branch. 🙂
A Tour of B’s campus through the kids’ eyes
It was warmish the other day and the air was clean so I sent the kids on a walk around campus (a lot of times, the field/courts are packed with students until dark). Is sent PS with my old phone to take pictures on their walk which kept them all happy. Here’s what they brought home:
Church Relief Society Party- Chinese style
3/21/15
For our Relief Society Birthday party at church, one of the Chinese women somehow arranged a building at Olympic Forest Park with some traditional Chinese performances. As the planning went further, they decided to invite families since there would be a magician the kids would enjoy. Bet none of you have this exciting of a Relief Society birthday activity!
Olympic Forest Park is pretty far north of downtown Beijing. It’s near the Bird’s Nest but we were too tired to walk further to see it. We went to the South Gate Forest Park subway stop (line 8) and then walked further north.
Our building had a little balcony over the water and a broken down bicycle that didn’t stop the kids from riding it.
Four different people performed martial arts… dances. A woman played a Chinese zither. There was a magician who did traditional magic tricks. Before the show started, there was massage and something where they poked your ear and attached stickers to massage for a week (I was told it was painful, so we skipped that).
Then a Chinese dragon dance!
Squirt loved the lions dancing, not so much standing next to the lions. PS and I didn’t realize we were accidentally being photo-bombed.
Afterwards, the Relief Society president sent out pictures taken by a photographer that was there. The two top, right hand pictures are the W family, the other homeschooling family in our branch.
Playing a Relief Society trivia themed hot potato game.
A few videos: https://youtu.be/ACMy6iBSpJ4
Walking back to the subway park through the beautiful park with all the trees starting to blossom. We walked with the Ws.
Chinese School
Garbage
This is the trash “dump” for our neighborhood. The red building to the left, that’s our building. We live in the far corner you can’t see though. The little carts in front of the “dump,” garbage trucks. I’m not sure how trash works in all of Beijing, but for our building, there are three, normal-sized trash cans (like the smaller neighborhood ones we had in the 80s before the giant green ones took over) outside our main apartment door. On is for recycling, one for kitchen waste, one for other. As far as I can tell, we are the only people that pay attention to the labels. When we first moved in we had no idea where to throw away our trash because, it’s a big building, we were looking for a large dumpster. A few times a day a guy walks (or sometimes it’s attached to a bicycle, I think) a cart in and sort through all the garbage by hand. I try not to think about this too much because 1) what a horrible job!! and 2) someone is literally sorting through everything we throw away. Then the trash comes to this facility where… I have no idea what they do… squish it down? It smells bad, but it’s not like they are burning it or anything.
The Muxiyuan Fabric Market
A friend at church started a craft night on the last Friday of every month and the upcoming one was for our daughters to make drawstring backpacks. She told me how much fabric I’d need to get and I requested a field trip to the fabric market I’d heard so much about.
The fabric market is at the Dahongmen stop (line 10). I met two friends there and they helped me get the fabric I needed then I tagged along while they did some more shopping. It was pretty cool. Entire little shops/stalls full of only buttons, or only zippers, etc. Apparently everything is much cheaper here so I’ll have to stock up on some fabrics before we move back to the States.
These little buses were adorable. This is the only time I’ve ever seen anything like them. Not sure what they are for.
Princess Sparkley’s finished drawstring backpack:
Wonton Soup
Since living in China, we haven’t really found any of our favorite “Chinese foods” here that we are used to in the US. No orange chicken. No crab rangoon. No egg foo yung. This stuff may or may not exist here, but we haven’t come across it. We’ve barely even found egg rolls. The other day, B and I went grocery shopping on a Saturday and went out to lunch at Wanda Plaza where we found a restaurant called… Chengdu Snacks, or something like that. I had wonton soup! Yum!
Other food discoveries:
When we first arrived in Beijing McDonalds had pineapple, apple, taro and a chocolate with white filling pies. The chocolate and apple ones were apparently promotional. And apple is back! We had apple pies delivered for Pi Day (3/14/15).
Throat lozenges. The red box is gross. These are sort of flavorless, which is weird, but better than red. The 7-Eleven by church has orange, we’ll have to try those next.
PS made Oreo yogurt popsicles.
This is apparently a melon. We haven’t tried it yet. It’s the size of an apple.
Grocery Trip
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted pictures of some of the foods we’re finding to eat.
B’s school gave all the teachers a box of apples (two layers deep).
And another box with blueberries, kiwis, grapes, strawberries, a pineapple and pistachios.
Yogurt is big here, and it comes with pointy straws to poke through the lid so you can drink it.
This is a French imported yogurt, sort of custard like in consistency. The boys love it.
Spicy peanuts B and PS like.
!!!! We’ve had better luck finding good deals on familiar cereals at BHG and Jenny Lou’s lately.
The regular stores usually carry Cheeios and a chocolate cereal and that’s about it.
B loves these. They are potato chips that taste … like a salad.
Baby food pouches.
We call these Chinese S’mores.
Chinese Mileposts 