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[Continued from Part 1]

On our first full day in Yingtan, we drove to Mama Zhu’s house, located in one of the little villages on the outskirts of the city. The village is surrounded by rice paddies, and we had to park on the main road and walk the narrow alleyways to Mama Zhu’s house.

As soon as the van approached the village, we could see a small crowd gathered for our arrival, with Mama Zhu right at the front. She eagerly embraced each one of us as we got out, and rushed us up to her house where she had food waiting for us. Bountiful meals would be a recurring theme on each of our visits that week.

We had an amazing trip to China a few weeks ago.

One of our big goals for spending time in Asia this year was to travel to China at least once. As our time here progressed, however, we kind of lost sight of that goal. The kids have been doing very well in school, and we were reluctant to take them out for any length of time. Ali and I are also starting to make some good headway on our business projects, and we have been trying to take advantage of the time the kids are in school as we don’t know what our work situation will be like once we hit the road again in May. There just never seemed to be a good time for us to go away for a week or two.

However, we realized after Christmas that if we were to make good on our plans to visit China, we’d have to bite the bullet and just go for it.

We’re pretty worn out from all the festivities, but here are the highlights from Lia’s sixth birthday…

When we checked in to our Yingtan hotel, we were given an “upgrade” to a suite. I say “upgrade” because while it did have two beds on separate levels which was great for parental privacy, it meant that we were located in the smoky gambling wing of the hotel right across from the “massage” parlour [...]

On Friday we are going to China. That sentence is deceptively simple, and belies all of the conversations, decisions, emails, and errands that went into making it happen. Back in the winter of 2010, when we were deciding where to spend our first year of Operation Hejira, we toyed with doing an extended period in [...]