The Extended Vacation Stage

We have been in China for three weeks and it still feels like an extended vacation.  We have done some great tourist things, but ultimately we haven’t wanted to burn our kids out on foreign overload.  Getting around here takes a lot of extra effort and false starts (like 2 tries before we finally got into the Forbidden City), but there is a cool satisfaction at taking in more of this amazing culture.  We get access to a language experience few people get, we can see ancient sites, and we get to do it with the whole family.  Whenever we are on vacation with our kids, we have to mix excursion days packed with sightseeing, with some chill days where there can be unstructured play time. We have been doing a lot of that here and trying to add in some homey family traditions that makes us feel like we still kind of have a routine.  We will go to a park and climb trails and pathways of rock, then we will go to the apartment and have a movie night, we will weave with the masses through the imperial gardens of the Ming Dynasty, and then we will get some McDonalds ice cream cones.  We will walk through the stores with tons of trinkets and shops and get lost in Wangfujing, then go swim in the pool upstairs at the hotel.  It’s a balance thing.  And sometimes I think the kids tolerate the foreign things when prodded, but are pretty content just to be at home doing the normal, everyday stuff and getting to play and watch their favorite shows.

FOOD

Our favorite thing to do in a new place is always to figure out cool places to eat.  We have been to 2 Peking Duck restaurants: LiQuan and Quanjude.  Both super good, but the authentic feel of eating in a hutong (an ancient style courtyard house) made LiQuan feel pretty magical.  (Check it out in our orgill famiy 2 video).  We found Shanghai soup dumplings, Stu and I’s favorite, at a place called Din Tai Fung.  We will definitely be going back there A LOT.  The kids inhaled everything and they even had chocolate dumplings.  So good.  Another fun spot we found was HaiDiLao HuoGuo, a traditional hot pot place.  They do handpulled noodles which essentially means a guy stretched some noodle dough by flying them all around your table, dancing and flicking the noodles all around and then throwing them in the boiling pots on our table.  

SITES

Forbidden City

BeiHai Park

Wangfujing Shopping District

When we talked to people about where to live in China, people told us Shanghai is the business center and Beijing is the cultural center.  That is a major perk of being here.  Not only is the most standard Mandarin spoken here, but there are TONS of places to explore that have ancient significance and beautiful architecture and meaning.  The most famous, and the one that is also walking distance to our apartment right now is the Forbidden City.  It was a super hot day and it is one of the most visited destinations in China, so we fought crowds and weaved through the Gate of Heavenly Purity, and the gate of Supreme Harmony, and finally to the Imperial Gardens. It is all stunning.

Later that week, we went to BeiHai Park. It has a center lake with boating available, floating lily pads, and arched stone bridging stretching out across the water. In the center, a white Buddhist pagoda rises from stone paths and we loved climbing up there to see the view of the Beijing skyline. There were serene walkways through rock sculptures, small pagodas and stairways, small ponds, and little porches where old people gathered to sing songs and play the accordion. My kids said this place felt like walking around Mulan.

We live right on the edge of the Wangfujing Shopping Area right now. It is kind of like the Times Square of Beijing with a big center walkway closed to traffic and advertisements everywhere. There are huge malls on every size and you walk in to floor after floor of vendors. Kind of overwhelming, and kind of awesome. We are especially enjoying that there are hundreds of restaurants to try around here and we can just wander around food courts and find delicious things to eat. Lots of Asian food that is, so my kids are also grateful that there is a McDonalds close too.

 

LIFE SETUP

Bank of China bank accounts

Signing a lease on a house

Finalizing enrollment at the Montessori School of Beijing

Starting the furniture hunt

It takes a lot of research to set up life in a new place, especially when everyone you talk to speaks Chinese.  Luckily we have lawyers who speak both so we have the proper residence permits and such, but bank accounts was another story.  We have to wait for a month to get cleared by HSBC which is the same as our US bank, but because its technically a separate bank they have to do background checks for the international services part. So in order to get functional right away, we had to set up stuff with Bank of China. There no one spoke English so we used google translate and muscled through the set up process. We now have bank accounts and can use didi, the Chinese Uber, and other Chinese apps.

I was expecting cultural shock, but it is always more crazy when you're actually here and doing it. I think it has been helpful to know that in three months we will be more settled and have figured out a lot more, so it's okay if things feel hard right now. It is all a part of the ride.