It's Sunday night and I'm heading back to San Jose tomorrow. It's a real downer from a family perspective but it's definitely needed from a professional perspective. Oh well, life is full of trade-offs. We've got a big holiday coming up here in China and Jess has been planning a wonderful Japanese adventure for us. We're all pretty excited. I'll try to recap some of the things we've been up to this weekend. I have a few pictures from my iPhone but hopefully Jess will log on later and update this post with some good photos from her camera.

Weather We've had three days of absolutely gorgeous weather. I really enjoyed (most) of the weather last fall, and this year seems to be heading in the same direction. There are a lot of people hanging out outside soaking up the sun and the clean air. The pollution index has been between 30 and 75 all weekend (for reference, 30 is approximately 'normal' for most of the U.S.). I even managed to get a sunburn today. The sunburn isn't cool but that fact that it was clear enough for the sun to burn me says it was pretty darn nice. I've mentioned before about how my standards for "clear days" have really dropped since moving to Beijing, but it's days like today that make us realize what we've been missing.

Friday After work we got take-out from the new dumpling and noodle place that opened up near our house. Everyone we know that has eaten there raved about the food.It turns out they don't have the take-out process down pat. It took 45 minutes for them to make our food and in the end they forgot to give us half our order. The food was tasty, but they forgot my spicy pig tongue. I'm not a big bread/noodle guy so I was counting on the pig tongue dish for my dinner. We tried calling them to tell them they forgot half of our food but they only speak Chinese so they kept hanging up on us. Annoying. We'll give the place another try but we'll eat in next time.

Saturday

Adeline has gymnastics on Saturday mornings at 8:30am which is a little early for us since Saturday morning is typically our "lounge around and have a big breakfast" morning. Several of the Esmond kids came over to play and both Jess and I hit a charity book sale that was being held at a local school.

Xiao Guo came over to babysit so Jess and I could attend a dinner party at a friends house (yep, we took the motorcycle). The food was catered in by a local Chinese caterer and it was fantastic! The wine was excellent as well. :) We spent several hours chatting about all things Beijing and then headed home. Henry is still doing his "adolescent power-struggle" with Xiao Guo. He wouldn't listen or go to bed and so when we got home at 11:30pm he was sitting there on the couch with Xiao Guo. Jess and I don't really know how to fix it. Addi and Truman aren't having problems so we're not really sure what's going on.

Sunday

On Sunday's Henry has rugby practice at ISB so we all went there to watch him and also to let Addi play on the playground with her friends. Most of the families that were at the dinner party on Saturday night were at the school playgrounds enjoying the nice weather so we continued our conversations from the previous evening.

After rugby practice we had lunch at a western restaurant with the Showalters. There were so many of us that we took the minivan and the motorcycle. It was nice but by the time we were leaving both family's kids were in need of naps and were starting to meltdown. After lunch we took naps and started preparing for the week ahead.

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