Catching Up

It's been a little while since my last post, so I figured I'd drop a note to catch you all up on a few things. In no particular order, here's what's been keeping us occupied recently.

1. The past few weeks have seen the resumption of regular visits by people who are friends of friends back home and who get in touch with us for a get together while in Beijing. We had one friend of our friends Cindy and Paul in Massachusetts who very kindly brought all sorts of goodies for us from the US (including a replacement bowl for my beloved Hario Nouveau vacuum coffee maker) and my new Amazon Kindle (about which more later), and friends of my old college friend Ray who were on a China-wide trip and made time to see us for an evening of dinner, dessert and a visit to Beijing's lone gay bar, which happens to be one block from where we live.

2. Speaking of the Kindle, what a great thing that is! The impetus for buying it was the promise of being able to carry, in one small package, a wide range of reading material for our Africa trip (about which more later). Also, since new books are rather hard to come by here, and tend to come to Beijing's few English-language bookstores only if they have China-related content and at very inflated prices, this was a good way of being able to get current non-China books at a discount. But another benefit of it that I had not considered was that it makes it possible to read in situations where previously it was not. It's amazing how much idle time one has, and with the Kindle in tow it's possible to use that time to make a few pages' progress in whatever you're currently reading. As an example, I had bought Ken Follett's World Without End just before our trip to Spain in January. It's a 1000+ page book, and by the time the Kindle arrived I had barely got to page 300. However, in the ensuing fortnight I managed to finish the book easily (it helped that it's a great read). I've now added several other books to my Kindle, including several current books (such as Ian Pears' Stone's Fall, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind (recommended by my friend and fellow blogger Ed Z), and Yu Hua's Brothers, which I had started reading in Chinese several years ago but did not make tremendous progress with. I also got several (free) classics for good measure, such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment and The Master and Margarita. I should have plenty to keep me occupied on the flight.

3. Apropos of the flight, it's just one more week to go before we leave for South Africa. We have been planning this trip for nearly six months, and it's hard to believe it's nearly upon us. We are going to split our time more or less equally between Cape Town and the Kruger Park, with visits to the Cape Wine Country and Johannesburg squeezed in in between. We have our cameras all cleaned and ready, and got a new 100-400mm zoom lens to be able to capture the animals at Kruger as closely as possible while maintaining a safe distance. It promises to be a phenomenal trip.

4. Our kitchen and bathroom renovations are nearly complete. I already wrote about the kitchen renovation, but the story did not end until the other day. After a few weeks working with the new sink I came to the conclusion that I was never going to be happy with a faucet that wobbled whenever you used it and a soap dispenser that did not dispense soap. So I took myself to the Home Depot (yes, there is one here) and bought a new Moen faucet and a replacement soap dispenser (also by Moen). The cost of the faucet was easily five times that of the faucet that the landlord bought us, but it's SO much better I really don't care (and besides, I have put the cheap one away to be returned in place should we ever move out of here to another apartment). The bathroom renovation was a bit of a disappointment; while it's great finally to have a shower and to be rid of the useless jacuzzi tub, and it's stupendous to have good water pressure for a change, I was surprised that instead of putting in a new shower base and building the shower around that, they instead just glassed in a corner of the room and used the existing bathroom floor as the shower base. This would be acceptable if it were not for the fact that the drain is not the lowest part of the floor, so the water just sort of accumulates at the far end and only disappears through evaporation. I'm also not quite convinced that the bathroom floor is waterproof, so fully anticipate that one day we'll have a leak through the downstairs ceiling.

5. Ivan had his little boy surgery at the international veterinary clinic that my old college classmate runs. He came out of it completely unscathed (well, other than the way he was supposed to) and he was running up and down the stairs by the evening of the day the surgery took place. He and Leo continue to play beautifully together, and while Ivan was out of the house Leo was visibly depressed. Ivan now is entitled to be registered for half-price, and not a moment too soon, since May is the month when dogs must be registered in Beijing. That'll be our main undertaking this coming weekend.

6. Our little gym is doing pretty well. Several new clients have signed up, and the gym has forged corporate partnerships with a range of companies and will be attending the annual "Expat Show" that takes place in late May. With all these things there is hope that a lot more people will at least know about the gym and then perhaps we'll get more sign ups too.

7. That about covers things here. I'll be writing again soon, most likely from Africa!