Whirlwind

It seemed like I'd gotten back to a good posting volume in December, but then lost it right around New Year. That would be because right around the last few days of December we made a decision to return to CA.

Of course Dan is still working here, but Devin, Merlin & I are returning so that we can help out my dad who is recovering from a second back surgery. We'll be moving in together when we get back to Davis.

I'm looking for a house and trying to get all this accomplished as smoothly as possible, so I may not post very often in the meantime. In fact I don't know what that means for the fate of the blog, though technically, since we're going back, it'll be the Opposite Shore of the one we're on currently.... I don't know.

I do have a lot of pictures and things I'd been planning to post, so I may just drag them out a bit longer even though we're returning in a week.

Welcome to the whirlwind!

Beijing Nights

A while back I meant to write a post about the night life on our street. It's a bustling place as soon as the lights go on and people come out of doors in search of a cheap and easy meal. All up and down the street vendors wheel their carts and three-wheeled bikes along the curb and open up shop, patching in to the electrical system to light their incandescent bulbs. Even as the weather gets chillier, they're still out there. There are big barrel ovens with baking sweet potatoes and small coal stoves heat big woks full of something that looks like black stones in which chestnuts are roasted. Other vendors have glass-faced shelf-boxes in which "kabobs" of fruit are laid, having been drizzled or dipped in a sugar syrup so they're gleaming and colorful.

The big draw are the carts that open up into trays of bubbling soup. Vegetables and meats are strung on kabob sticks and then customers come and choose what they want to set into the boiling, spicy soup. When they're cooked, you just pull it out and eat it.

We tried it but it was spicier than the girls liked, so it's not something we've done since, though we have gone out just to walk through the crowd and get a festive feeling.