Springtime?

We're in the midst of the New Year and Springfest holiday. For two weeks most of the country is on vacation. You probably saw the news about all of the snow and the problems it caused for travelers. Fortunately we were spared having to deal with snow ... cold, that's another problem. We're anxiously awaiting the arrival of warm. The weather report states that there's a warming trend coming in about a week. Believe me, we will embrace the warmth. Never thought that I'd be wearing long underwear with three other layers all day long. Many stores and offices are not heated so you wear your coat all day long while you work. The only really warm time is in bed, (we bought a heavy comforter to supplement our blankets).

The Chinese Lunar New Year's - Spring Festival is still going on for a few more days. We're still hearing fireworks, but, not throughout the entire night. On New Year's eve the fireworks started early and lasted throughout the night. We didn't get much sleep. Because it's a holiday and most businesses were shut down it was easy for us to move to our apartment because it was easy to catch a taxi. A problem with the holiday is it was difficult to change money to pay the six months rent plus deposit required to rent our apartment. At the seventh bank we tried they told us that we could go to the main office, downtown and they would take care of us. We, along with our friend Charlie, got on a taxi and off we went. When we got to the 8th bank we were told "Yes, we can change your money,but, our computers just crashed." With only an hour to go before we were to meet with our landlord, we were worried. After a quick trip to the WC, thinking this could be fixed, indeed it was, we changed the money and went victoriously to sign the rental contract. Out landlord is a gem. He supplied us with many of the items we needed to cook and eat as well as a microwave and a small automatic water purifier which boils about 2 liters of water at a time.

For those of you who were with us last summer we are settled in about 10 minutes from Peter's TexMex restaurant which is becoming our retreat. It's warm, has food we recognize, (no pig's intestines with peanut sauce here), has wireless access, and most of the waiters speak English. We're posting this from Peter's as we have outstanding cinnamon rolls. Another landmark you'll remember is Carrefour which is about 20 minutes from our apartment.

Our apartment is an efficiency unit similar to a hotel room on steroids. The price and location were right, it's quiet and clean and we've able to get it relatively warm after we finally figured out the controls. When we take a shower the whole bathroom gets wet, a common occurence in this country.

We've found several good shopping places that are similar to Meijer's or Walmart although the meat department isn't even close. From squid to pig's hides, from shrimp to internal things we won't mention, the meat department is interesting to say the least.

Someday we'll post some pictures.