1. I take back my mockery at seeing puffy coats for sale in August at the malls here. Last time I wrote when it was 21C, and the remainder of the week shot back up to 26C. Today is 19C , a beautiful sunny day, and I feel quite cold, even with my heavy fleecy sweat jacket on through out the day, and having the need to put socks on. I cannot believe that I have acclimatized to the hotter climate. I will most def. freeze my tush off when we head home at Christmas for a visit. I better figure out which box my heavy winter coats are in so that we can go dig it out once we get to the storage unit back home. Oh, Jason did his exit/entry today to Hong Kong. He also witnessed folks wearing puffy coats and toques already! Surreal.

2. I also take back comments of confusion of why they were selling humidifiers here, when it was sooo humid here (in the summer/spring/fall months). The humidity made you dewy all the time, at worst, constantly sweaty. As if with flip of a switch, the temperatures cooled down, and humidity has been turned off. It’s dry. it’s nice, BUT, with the hard water with lots of minerals drying on the skin plus the new found dryness, everyone is chapped. We actually stated how we need to get some heavy duty moisturizing lotion or cream, as after a shower and drying off starts to cause itchy dry skin. I esp hate how the lower back when bending over or sitting down, the skin stretches and starts to itch or crack. Crazy!

3. We finally bought an oven. Okay, it’s really a toaster oven. People here don’t use ovens at home, so we only had the space to fit a large toaster oven in where the microwave was sitting (it now sits above the minute fridge). It’s so nice having any sort of oven. Jason over the weekend made his own pizza, dough and all. It was so good and stomach warming. So far we also had a lovely roasted head of garlic as well. Yumm!! Can’t wait to start making casseroles and roasts.

4. The leaves on trees have just started to change colours and started to fall. It’s nice to see a change in season, and to be able to wear layers again. The only downside is that we now have to go shopping for layering clothes to prepare for the cooler weather here. When we left Vancouver we thought, “15C isn’t so bad, it’s quite warm!”  We failed at the time to realize that we would acclimatize to the warmer weather, so that the warmness is relative to the overall average temperatures. So needless to say, we don’t have any fall/winter clother here really.

5. I’m still worried about the amount of hair I’m loosing daily. I know it’s normal to loose 60-100 hairs a day on average, but I have thin hair to begin with. My ponytail diameter has lost at least 1/3 of it. I really hope it is just due to the heat/climate change or maybe even stress, and NOT because of the environmental pollution or chemicals in our food and air… There is still so much unknown chemicals that Chinese consumers ingest due to pollution or products not made to Western standards yet.

6. On Tuesday, both of us went up to Shenzhen to visit relatives. My cousin, Fernando and his family were visiting his father, my Uncle Mike. I haven’t seen Fernando in at least 10 years, and I also got to see his little girl for the first time, Jade is already 22 months and ever so precious.  We were treated to a surprise visit by another cousin of ours, Shini, who I’ve not seen for 22 years. It was surreal, still the same yet grown up. Jason met the cousins all for the first time, which is nice that he can put a face to the names now. It’s a big job for him, I have at least 13 Uncles and Aunts, 26 first cousins, countless second cousins… and this is just in the immediate family.  That day I had also met a nephew of mine (second cousin) who is 10 years older than I am at the least. He called me auntie. Surreal.

7. Last Thursday I had a meeting with a local international school, which is Korean, located about 10 min away from our apartment. They head-hunted me through a friend, and wants hire me to teach English and cultural understanding of North America, and maybe head up the art department. I was somewhat interested as it would be quite the experience to be in China, teaching Korean students English as well as some Mandarin, and get to teach art. The only major two problems are: I’m not an English teacher (which means I don’t have a BA, and it will be difficult for them to get a working visa for me), and I don’t want to be working full time Chinese-style through all holidays. I would have to observe Korean holidays and some Chinese ones, no Christmas break, as they have their winter camp to lure new students from Korea. Nothing is decided yet, so I will see where this situation will lead to on it’s own.

8. We finally have a stereo speaker system, and boy, it’s so nice to have music in the house. We survived with the laptop playing music, or hooking the laptop up to the TV, but music not played properly on a good speaker system is such a shame, and has no feelings. With fall happening, it’s been nice listening to jazz properly at night while we work or read. Such a luxury to have :)