Year in Photos

Last May I decided to take one picture a day for an entire year and I made it! I used an app to keep all my pictures in a calendar. I love looking back at past months to see what we were up to.

May 2016

May was a typical month. A few play/coffee dates with friends and hanging out at home.

June 2016

June was a pretty normal month around here as well. J had a few days off work for Dragon Boat festival. J also celebrated his birthday this month.

July 2016

July was a busy month. We potty trained Little O, it went better than expected! We went to Shanghai for a day with friends. And we traveled to Guilin, China for a long weekend.

August 2016

August was a good month. Mostly a typical month with playing outside, getting beers with friends. The highlight of the month was when Little O started preschool!! He goes five days a week, and rides the bus. Most days he loves it, but he does occasionally want to stay home and hangout with me.

September 2016

September was a month to get used to our new normal. Little O is at preschool every day and I started a mandarin course at a local University five days a week as well. We still had time to see friends, celebrate my birthday and go on a couple date nights.

October 2016

The first week of October is the national week holiday. We all had time off work/school so we headed to Cambodia. We visited Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, the best part of the trip was definitely Angkor Wat. It was amazing, I hope to visit again some day.

November 2016

November was a month for apartment searching/packing, and saying good-bye to friends. Our good friends moved to southern China, we were very sad to see them go. We were also busy looking for a new apartment, our landlord wanted to give our old apartment to his newly married son/daughter-in-law. Again we were sad to leave our old apartment, but we were able to find a new place in our same complex.

December 2016

Typically we would spend December in the USA, but this year we decided to do it a little differently. We spent the last two weeks of the month traveling around Thailand. It was a great trip, but it felt like we didn't have a Christmas. Before leaving on our trip we did get to do a few Christmas events, like visiting Santa, a Christmas market in Shanghai and brunch with good friends.

January 2017

Just a normal month again in January. A few play dates, my cellphone died, manicure/pedicure for me, and we ended the month celebrating our third wedding anniversary.

February 2017

Nothing too exciting happened in February. Little O was home sick for a week with a fever. We took the train to Shanghai with friends.

March 2017

March was a fun month! Little O turned three!! J went to the US for work while Little O and I went to Osaka, Japan to visit my brother. My mom, dad, sister and niece were also visiting. It was a really fun partial-family reunion.

April 2017

This part month was again a fairly typical month. The weather has warmed up and the rain has mostly stopped so we had a few outdoor playdates. We also randomly meet a university classmate of my brother and sister in laws through the parent of one of Little O's classmates.

So there you have it a quick recap of what we have been up to for the last year.

Sorry!

I know I've been terrible at writing posts for a while now. Both Little O and I started school in September, he in preschool and me in University learning Chinese. I hope to get caught up with our travels as my school year is coming to an end soon. I can't promise that I will be perfect as we have a busy summer ahead of us. But I will do my best to post regularly.  

Quick USA recap

In April Little O and I had a quick trip to the USA so I could attend the wedding of a good friend of mine from University. We were also there for Easter and had the chance to see a lot of friends. I did not take as many pictures as I normally do, so here are a few highlights from our two week trip.

Waiting to find some candy! A side note, my mom made the purple bunny costume...in the 80's, at least I think that it when it was.

I didn't get many pictures on Easter, but I love this one with my best friend.

A trip home would not be complete without a play date with our PEPS friends.

Throwing rocks into Capitol Lake never gets old

I did not get enough time with these beautiful ladies.

Museum of Flight

Pointe Defiance Zoo and Aquarium

A little gardening with Grandpa

Chinese New Year 2016: Bali, the Flowers

I am definitely my father's daughter! Where he takes pictures of every interesting door he sees on vacation, I do the same for flowers. Or at least I did when we were on our trip to Bali, Indonesia.  But really they are beautiful and very different than the flowers I see every day.

Since I took a few (possibly too many) I decided they deserved their own post. So here are the many flowers and plants of Bali!

Chinese New Year 2016: Bali - Part 2

On one of our days on Bali we visited a few of the tourist sites around the island. It was a busy day, but really good. Our first stop was to see a traditional Indonesian dance. The performance we saw was the Barong and Keris dance. Barong is a mythological lion-like creature, he is a good spirit. Barong has an enemy, Rangda, she is the demon queen. The performance features a battle between Barong and Rangda.  The Keris dance is a popular scene where Rangda wreaks havoc with black magic, causing soldiers to commit suicide by stabbing themselves with their own kris'. Barong and the priest are able to cast a spell to protect the men.

It was a really fun show to watch. Little O felt that it was a little longer than necessary. He did enjoy playing the metallophone after the performance. (I think this is the correct name for the instrument.)

Barong

Rangda

After the dance performance we went to a few shops to see traditional Indonesian arts and crafts. These stops "conveniently" had large gift shops to purchase the craft you had just seen.

Ikat weaving

Batik - Hand painted fabric using, wax for the outline and natural elements to dye.

Our next stop was gross and tasty all at the same time. We got to taste some traditional teas and we had a cup of Kopi Luwak coffee. The teas were very nice and the view was enjoyable. Kopi Luwak coffee is coffee that has been partially digested and defecated by a civet (a cat-like animal). Yup, basically we drank a cup of poop coffee. It was just a very strong cup of coffee to me, but I am not a coffee connoisseur.

The coffee!

We visited a few temples as well, Bali has a lot of temples! Unfortunately I do not remember the names of the temples, but here are a few pictures from what we saw.

Our last stop of the day was to the bat temple, I am not sure if that is the official name, but that is what I am calling it. The next picture is part of the bat temple

Now let's zoom in a little above that yellow umbrella to see what is really going on in that cave...yes those are bats and yes there are hundreds of them! Yuck! 

While visiting Bali we also took a cooking class. It was really fun and the food was delicious! It was a little bit hard to do with Little O because he wanted to be involved. He did like to eat the 'fruits of our labor'! I was too busy cooking to take any pictures.

Overall we had an amazing trip to Bali. I hope that we are able to go back some day and explore a different part of this beautiful island.