Books, Author
It’s been almost a year since my last blog post. If this sounds like the movie version of someone entering the confession booth in church, I mean no disrespect to those who know and practice the real thing.
Last year’s plethora of posts celebrated our post-pandemic return to China and other travel on “their” (our kids’) side of the International Dateline. Posts were packed full of adventure, revisited and first-time destinations, newfound relatives, and family history resources.
We wish our family and friends a happy, healthy, productive, peaceful, and safe 2023! This secular one is our second New Year of three–after Rosh Hashanah–with Chinese New Year, known in China as Spring Festival, coming up January 22.
“New Rules” (with apologies to Bill Maher):We are fortunate that our hotel quarantine stay was only five days, with the next three in the apartment we have for the duration. If no apartment, hotel quarantine would have been eight. This is the most recent regulation for quarantine when traveling to Beijing. I think! Right now, the situation is changing daily. But we are done.
Only a Nainai (Chinese for grandma on children’s dad’s side) and Yeye (Chinese for grandpa, ditto). Our granddaughters Mirah (just 5) and Rivah (2.5+) and their parents, Jonathan and Amy, live in Beijing. The pandemic deprived us of seeing them for two years. They did finally visit in Milwaukee this summer, a taste of being back together that only whetted the appetite for more. Before COVID, when Mirah was a baby and toddler, we made a point of seeing them a lot, between their trips to the US, ours to China, and a few vacations elsewhere. Rivah was a 2020 COVID-era baby, so we missed her progression from four months to over two.