This Great Work

Before we moved to China, my dream life was to stay home and make dinner for my neighbors.  If asked of a place I'd like to travel, I would usually comment that I would rather have a kitchen remodel than seeing far away places.  That is because I have come to really enjoy having people over for dinner and a kitchen remodel would make that much easier on me--which I cared more about than seeing the world. (It also illustrates my extremely low need for adventure to be happy.) Thankfully I have been able to continue that hobby in China. It is a bit more of a challenge here because of an even smaller kitchen capacity, lack of ingredients and my concern about feeding Chinese people food they might actually like.  For my personal records here are dinners I have photos of. Tina and James (our liaison for our landlady) Sherry, Talia & Stella (Tom's co workers; and Stella tutors me in Chinese) Penny (one of my Chinese teachers) Melissa's cousin (someone from CCID branch asked ...

We went to Chengdu for summer's last hurrah.  Chengdu is a city of 21 million people in western China. It is as far away from us as Nauvoo is from our home in the US.   We could have taken the high speed train.  But it was a 10 hour ride and a little more expensive than flying.  So we opted to fly.   We've made better choices before.  On our way there, the plane was delayed more than 2 hours, putting us landing after 11:00pm, which caused us to have to take a taxi instead of the 30 minute ride by high speed train into the city. And somehow we got the slowest taxi driver on the planet (was he really Chinese??). But we got there and tucked ourselves in real late.  (That was nothing, however, compared to our trip home where our plane was delayed for 7 hours...causing us to arrive home at 3:05am--not really worth the ¥15 savings--two-ish dollars per ticket.)   Lesson learned:  Planes in China are just no match for the efficiency of...