Daily Life

Life Update 2023

So you may have noticed I have been using my blog here to keep an updated journal of a fictitious character from my Dungeons & Dragons game. It is a convenient spot to do this. I will be continuing to do this, at least once a week here, but I don’t want to just do that.

I spent the last couple of days going back through my older posts and putting them into categories, as I had 100 posts in the “Uncategorized” group, and that seemed odd to me, so I organized them.

Tomorrow, I go back to work, as we have been on vacation for the last 7 weeks. This was an attempt by the school to accommodate students and teachers who might be traveling abroad during the winter break. When the calendar was decided at the beginning of the year, we were all still under a semi-lockdown.

We needed daily or bi-daily Nucleic Acid Tests, just to enter the school, this evidence was also required to enter supermarkets, restaurants, or pretty much anywhere. We migrated to online classes in Mid-November, and so pretty much everyone was shocked when in January it was announced to just open everything up.

No more tests to enter places, no more vaccines mandates, or checking for health to go to supermarkets, travel, or anything. No more quarantine. quite a few teachers took that as a sign to go home for the holiday, where they had originally planned to stay due to fears of quarantine when they returned. But what this meant for the holiday was, that we now had a super long winter break, and the original reason for it was made moot.

Now when I say super long vacation, it really is just a combination of 3 separate holidays we would have had normally. Normally we would get a Christmas break, a Chinese New Year’s break and a Spring break, in December, February and April respectively. Now we get the one massive one, and no big breaks for the rest of the year. Again, great idea at the time, but made moot by the last-minute change in covid-climate.

I am quite happy that everything is opening and recovering. But it will be a long second semester which may be harsh on the kids. I hope that everything works out.

More later.

BIBA

It has been a log time since I have posted….

The family and I are in a much better place now physically and emotionally. Now we still miss a lot of things from the ChaoYang urban cityscape, but the rural feel of ShunYi is very calming. For most of you, these places are unknown. ChaoYang is a large section taking up the Eastern half of Beijing, where we lived for the most part of 14 years. ShunYi is a region in northeastern Beijing that is close to the airport, and we moved here 1 year ago.

Our new school is called BIBA (Beijing International Bilingual Academy) and we are all flourishing here. My youngest daughter started ECC (Preschool) this year and has mostly loved it. She has two best friends that she plays with constantly. I have become friends with the father of one of them. The other I have not met the parents of, and she mostly plays with in school.

My middle daughter has met several friends in similar situations to us. Her BFF is a Hungarian girl. They both love art (Sammy is a graphic artist, her friend is musical). They joined the girls soccer team together and have since made many more friends as well. Sammy’s team (our school’s team) won the championship against the international school league in Beijing this year.

My eldest, Joshua has been heavily involved in the drama club and performing arts. Last year they put together Mulan, but were unable to perform it when the city locked down. This year he was in 15-Minute Hamlet, and they performed last night with 2 other short plays. He was amazing.

My wife has found a group of mothers that she hangs out with, and they do activities together. They go out shopping, have a weekly Bible study, go to local coffee shops and malls to relax. She loves it and I can easily see her opening up again. For the last 3 weeks we have been at birthday celebrations for someone from this group each weekend.

As for myself, I have found a very welcoming work environment, and good friends. I won’t lie, the work was difficult last year as I had to learn new methods and retrain myself in a few things as I went. But the school did have a support system with mentors and professional development seminars for us to use. It was awesome. I am a bit nervous this year because they as that experienced teachers develop and run some of these seminars. I’ll keep you posted.

Socially, I am doing well. I have a Bible study every Monday with a group of guys from work. I also just stated a school D&D club on Tuesdays for some of the teachers. This did mean I had to learn 5e, but it’s not a bad system and I am not having trouble converting things from Basic D&D (that I used to play in the 90s)

Vagueness

When I started this blog I promised myself that I would not post anything extremely negative and to focus on the differences in culture and positive things.

For the last year or so several very negative things have been happening and I will not be able to talk about them until end of next month.

Until then I just want you all to know we are ok, and to expect a big update middle of July