Greetings from 2021. The holidays have come and gone for most of the world, but here in China we’re still in the middle of them. This includes Chinese New Year, which just ended with the Lantern festival. You eat rice balls, hang out with extended family, and apparently set off a bagillion fireworks. My son recently reminded me more than once that I haven’t updated ye ole blog in awhile so here we are. For those of you wanting a preview – we’ll deal with Christmas, a trip to Beijing, and then the first two months of the year. And probably some other random stuff that may not fit into the chronological nature of this post.
Let’s start with Christmas. The wife and kids got out of school a few days before, but my place of employment doesn’t really do Christmas, so I was scheduled to work through Friday, Dec 25th. I mean, I didn’t. But that was the schedule. I finished up early on Christmas Eve, then joined my family at Zhongshan Hot Spring Resort. This was the place I wanted to bring the family since I visited there with my co-workers back in the fall for a dinner. So, the resort is a big hotel/hot springs/restaurant thingamabogger. Yes, we checked into a hotel on Christmas Eve. Yes, we had a Christmas Tree and presents under it at home. As well as that annoying Elf on a Shelf. But I drove separate from the kids and wifey, toting all stuff, sans Christmas tree, in the trunk of my car. It was a lovely quick stay-cation as it was only about 20 minutes from the house. The place was a little old, but our room was great and it even had a hot tub on the balcony that overlooked a koi pond.
My work hosted our Christmas Eve dinner at the resort’s restaurant (Its why we chose to stay the night in the first place). This was the same type of setup I’d had a few months earlier where I was forced to down a lot of Chinese alcohol, though this time, as an upstanding husband and father, I was able to just eat the food there and relax. They did make us all randomly sing Christmas songs. I went with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer when they handed me the mic since its basically a sing-a-long and my kids could get into it. The food, as always, is delicious at these types of shindigs. Though I don’t think my son was all too thrilled with this type of food. It also doesn’t help when they bring a chicken or duck out, the head comes right with it. Yes, I put a chicken head on my son’s plate and took pictures of it.
We wrapped up dinner and then headed back to our room, the kids getting to sleep early since Santa would be arriving. I believe we had a conversation about our hotel room not having a chimney, but our house doesn’t have one either… so… there. Once the children were nestled all snug in their beds, I…. went back out to the car to silently haul in all the presents, and that Elf. I arranged them as I surmised the Big Red Guy would have, then climbed into bed, thankful I did not have to continue handing out presents to the rest of the world. Christmas morning went smoothly. The kids got mostly what they wanted, and we were able to reach out virtually to friends and family to celebrate a bit with them. We had breakfast at the resort’s “western restaurant”. It was not very western, let me tell you, but I think we found enough for the kids to eat. Abby just kept feeding her scraps to the cats the were roaming around. FYI – China has a lot of cats. No, I have no idea if people eat them. Dogs on the other hand…. no I don’t know about that either. Anyway, we had free passes to tour the hot springs. They have a bunch of them there. Even one where you stick your feet in the water and fish nibble off your dead skin. In the end, we were tired. So we totally just skipped going to ANY of the hot springs. We can come back again sometime. We needed rest anyway, as we were scheduled to fly to Beijing the next day to finally visit… The Great Wall of China.
Alanna makes our travel plans. I don’t enjoy doing it, and she could spend hours just mock-planning random things if it were up to her, so yeah… go Alanna. We were originally going to do this trip last summer, but were told the area was a no-go because of the pandemic. This time around, we were OKed to give it go. Alanna, through her extensive travel research, found a spot on the Great Wall that would not be crowded with tourists. One of the reasons was that it was winter and super cold. But hey, I’ve lived in cold weather, right? Montana, Chicago, Iowa, New Jersey. We should be used to it? Ummm… no. It wasn’t any colder in Beijing than than those US States I mentioned, but I guess we’ll never get used to the shock. It was mostly single digit temperatures when we were there, and the highs didn’t get much out of the teens. We’d also been living in a tropical region for over a year, so our bodies, and clothing attire, just weren’t prepared. We rustled up some winter gear before we left our hometown, as we knew it would be cold up on the wall, but that still didn’t protect us. We left our hotel in Beijing at the crack of dawn and had a taxi service drive us the two hours up to that particular spot on the great wall. This area was up the mountains a bit, so it was even colder. As we arrived and then got out of the van, I wasn’t sure how we would be able to make it. We were all freezing our butts off. Walking helped though, and by the time we’d bought our (cheap) tickets, walked through the village, hiked up a steep hill, rode a gondola up a mountain until we finally made it TO the Great Wall, we were warmed up enough and plainly too excited to be cold.
I’m gonna go ahead an drop this truth bomb on you right now – being up on the Great Wall of China, with a very light snow falling, with no one around us at all, was… one of the most amazing experiences we’ve ever had. And we’ve had quite a lot of these types of moments. As we got to the top, we waded through more cats, climbed the stairs and slipped onto the walking path that is the Great Wall of China. To our left, the wall steadily climbed for miles up into the mountains of China and disappeared to the west. To our right, the wall continued on as well, but that was the direction we were heading, as this section of the all provided me with some thrill-seeking entertainment at the finish. More on that later. As a family, we spent a good hour on the wall, walking along, taking pictures, stopping at each guard tower, taking more pictures, stopping to rest, stopping to let Alanna cry because all of this was “overwhelmingly beautiful.” And it really was, but I can’t pass the chance to make fun of my wife. Logan also had a massive nosebleed half way through the trek, as well.. what would a Staton family outing be without some kind of misfortunate incident? My youngest child soon became tuckered out though, so her mother took her back the way we came, as Logan and I continued on to our final destination. Now there are a few ways up and down the wall. You can take the gondola either way, you can take ski lifts, you can even walk up some trails to get there. But there is one special way down that we wanted to try – and that was the toboggan. Yes, they built what looked like a mini-bobsled course off the side of the Great Wall that would eventually feed you out at the bottom area again. It was one of the main reasons Alanna picked this part of the wall, just so I could do this. In the end, it wasn’t too wild or crazy, and felt mostly safe. Logan and I both had a great time on the way down, and even got a souvenir picture of our experience. We met the ladies at the bottom of the mountain for a quick coffee, then Alanna and I had a fabulous Chinese lunch at a local place in among the shops. We then went to… Burger King. Yes, all the way up here, in the mountains next to the Great Wall of China… is a Burger King. Oh, and more cats. Which Abby once again fed her scraps to once we went back outside.
We spent the next few days in Beijing, planning and scheming. Covid was rearing its ugly head again. They were slowly shutting down districts in the city, meaning, if we wanted to safely travel back home, would couldn’t go there. We have these QR code things on our phones as a Covid procedure. To get into places like malls, or tourist places, or on planes, or go to back or or school, you need to be negative for Covid. One way they work this out is through this QR code thing. Basically, it spot checks where you go. If you stay in the areas where there is little to no Covid cases, your QR code turns green. You just show that to whoever needs to see it and you’re good to go. There’s also a Yellow level and then a Red Level, depending on which places you been that have have a current outbreak. We’ve never had anything other than Green on our QR codes, but we were worried that if we went to one of “those” districts in Beijing, we’d get a bad color. So, we cut out some of our tourist destinations while in Beijing. Honestly, it was too cold to be hanging outside at most of them anyway. We did make it to Tiananmen Square, which is in Central Beijing, just across from the Forbidden Palace. I won’t get into the history here, you can look it up yourself. But security was super tight here. Metal detectors, automatic weapons, dogs, the works. We made it through unscathed, though I’m pretty sure we were the only white people in Beijing that day. Seriously. It’s the dead of winter. It’s the pandemic. No one outside the country is really travelling here. We got into the large square, found a virtual Geocache (yes, I’m a geek), took loads of pictures, then stood in front of the Forbidden Palace to take pictures there as well. We had some of Alanna’s teacher’s friends tell us that they had to wait in line for over an hour to get into the palace, so it was cold, we don’t like lines, we skipped it. There’s so much to do in Beijing. We missed 95% of it and still had a great time. We also spent quality time at our hotel – ordering American fast food delivery, and swimming in their indoor pool. We did a little shopping here and there, and Alanna and I even snuck out for a little date for our anniversary. It wasn’t anything fancy, as literally this whole trip was our anniversary. Alanna was also deathly sick the whole time. Did I mention that? Yeah, she was. Not Covid sick. Just… nasty flu/I’m gonna die sick. I think we all passed it around a little those weeks around Christmas, but my better half got the worst of it by far. But she was a trooper and still managed to make her family have an awesome Christmas vacation.
We flew back into town right before New Years, and even with a green QR code, somehow they made Alanna and I go to Hospital Number 5 (I’m a VIP there by now) to get Covid Tests. Thankfully, they only did the throat swab. I’ve avoided the throat swab test somehow every time. The test here cost like 20 bucks or something and you get the results back in a few hours. Like I always say, China’s medical system isn’t warm and fuzzy, but it is damn sure efficient. We celebrated New Years like true champs – our kids falling asleep before the ball dropped and us two not really caring about it much either. China has a muted New Year celebration, as their big holiday is the Lunar New Year that happens sometime in early February.
I went back to work for 3 weeks in January, teaching some English workshops at the university and volunteering to sing in some kind of Chinese New Year’s talent group… thing. I dunno. We sang Auld Lang Syne to an acoustic guitar, then sang some quite catchy Chinese song that I have no idea what the lyrics meant. We looked good doing it though. Alanna and the kids were back in school for about month as well before we all stopped what we were doing again for the Chinese New Year. Alanna and the kids got a two week vacation. I was off… well… I got about a month and a half. I ain’t complaining.
Let’s talk about New Years resolutions, kay? Mine was the same – lose some more weight. I’d lost a good bit of it in 2019, then had the shoulder injury. 2020 was a wash, so with 2021 I kicked it back into high gear again. I’m smashing my goals so far and haven’t stopped with either the workouts or the eating healthy habits. Alanna wanted to learn to play the guitar. I’m not sure if that was her New Years resolution or not, but her birthday is mid- January so I bought her a guitar anyway. She’s doing well with that too – she can decently strum “Free Fallin’ ” and “Sweet Home Alabama”. She is talented that one. The kids have done well with the break too. My youngest has learned to ride her bike and is now becoming Ms. Independent. My son? Well… he’s gotten even better at video games, taken up photography and is even getting in some physical exercise in the form of jogging at school.
What else? Here are random things we’ve been up to:
In no particular order –
Online Shopping, Trivia Nights at the Bar (we either win or crash hard), A quick one night stay-cation at another hotel we like, hiking in a few different trails around town, professional development for me, Alanna’s family celebrating Christmas two weeks too late, a new Pizza Hut opened very close to us (Logan is happy), Wandavision, Watching the Superbowl at a bar at 7:00AM, failing to complete a 6 ghost pepper wings, 6 beers, in 6 minutes challenge, ripping my left big toenail off, we got a pet hamster named Ashley, rollerblading at the coast, playing Dungeons & Dragons, playing Scrabble, playing chess, playing Go Fish, getting bruises from a massage, ordering a LOAD of wings as often as possible, Alanna dancing with dragons, quite a few dinner parties, lunch parties, still wearing a mask when we need to, watching America be…. America, VISITING ANOTHER CAT CAFE. TOO MANY CATS IN CHINA, V-Day Flowers, watching the Rumble in the Jungle in a hotel, enjoying the once every few months rainstorm, and literally freaking loving our crazy nomadic life one day at a time.
If you need clarification on any of that lightning round stuff I just spewed forth up there, hit me up on social media, email, or just comment here. Hey… Happy New Year.
