The little man's beach trip

In November, C's school took a class trip to one of the beaches on our island. We left school on the bus and drove about twenty-five minutes. I was a chaperone for the trip, and my lovely little group of four boys decided the best possible place to sit on the bus was in the very back. I have a tendency to get sick in a vehicle that I am driving if the roads are bendy, and the trip to the beach was around multiple mountains, yippie! My group pretty much had to fend for the,selves on the bus, as I was solely focused on not losing my breakfast, but they did well.

Anyways, I was told we were about to the beach, so Imstarted looking out the window, when the bus suddenly stopped to let us off. We were in the middle of a road, with curves on both sides of us, and a cliff. We had to depart and walk single file about fifty yards before we reached a safe sidewalk to use.  Now we had about fifteen adults and sixty-five little, excited kids with us, talk about a chaperones nightmare! Amazingly, no one was killed or hit by a car before we made it to the beach, but then it was a free for all!

My group of boys were absolute lunatics and were covered head-to-toe in sand within the first ten minutes. In fact, every other adult was laughing because I was responsible for cleaning them up prior to lunch and the again before we left for school again. They decided tackle American football would be great fun, as evidenced by the pictures.

The beach was actually very beautiful, and one that I believe we will visit again. There were shark nets surrounding the swimming area, so we want to do a little investigating to see of this is a precaution or there are actually sharks that frequent the area. On a side note, Hong Kong is known to have a pink dolphin population, so maybe we do have lots of sharks here too.

C was also lucky enough that this trip took place while his NaNa and PaPa were here visiting. Mark, NaNa and PaPa took a taxi out to the beach and met us around lunch time. We had beautiful weather, so it was nice for them to see one of our beaches.

Finally, we ended the day with a community sand castle competition. My group did not succeed in winning the best design, but did dig the biggest trench, which is really all they accomplished!

Overall, it was a very fun day for all the adults and kids alike. Many fell asleep on the bus ride, including C :)

Living in a large complex has advantages...

In case anyone missed talking to my mother about the July & August weather in HK, I am here to tell you it is HOT. We are talking over 90 degrees with humidity to match. The meteorologists' on Channel 7 would have a hay-day describing the heat index here. I think they start calling something like 70% humidity "oppressive" in Ohio, well Ohio ain't got nothing on Hong Kong.

Anyways, my wonderful mother was nice enough to help us move from Ohio to HK. For the first 5 days, we lived in a hotel with one king bed and a twin size pull-out chair. If you are good at math, you realize this was too many people and too few beds. So we were already all a little grumpy, jet-lagged, and tired of sweating the minute we walked outside. We were so happy on moving day to see the swimming pool at our complex!

NaNa was brave enough to take the kids swimming during the day while I worked on moving stuff. Then in the evenings, after dinner, we would all go back out to swim again. Hong Kong generally only has a 5 degree difference in temp from sun up to sun down, so it was still a nice warm 92 degrees in the evenings:)

Our complex also had a "welcome back" pool party. Mark and the kids had a blast. It was decorated with all sorts of blow-up animals, a raft, buckets, water guns, and beach balls. We were really hoping to meet some new people here, but it was pure chaos! We also had Carson's school open house, so NaNa and I didn't want to mess our hair up, hence no swimming.

Here are some pictures of our pool and the kids prior to swimming.  I'm still working on uploading pictures without crashing my computer, I do have some really cute action shots of the pool party. Hopefully I can figure it out, or my wonderful husband could just buy me a properly working computer ;)

C's birthday party pictures

 PaPa bravely put on his mask and turned into one of our party villians! He was then captured and tied to the chair with toilet paper by our Super Heroes to protect C's birthday party from evil!

 It was very difficult to take a nice group shot, this was as good as we got!

Our Super Hero, dressed in his Green Lantern cape, ready for action (and snacks)!

Happy Birthday C

Disclaimer: This blog is going in no particular order at this point, I am just trying to post some pictures and adventures we have experienced thus far.

In November, we celebrated our son's 6th birthday! He picked the theme "super heroes" for the party, so off we went to the markets to prepare for the big day. Our quest was to find fabric for the super hero capes, party favors, and supplies for the themed-games. Sounds easy enough, right? Oh no, not in HK, shopping takes on a whole different dimension. You cannot simply drive your golf cart to Wal-Mart, or any other big box store for that matter. You must take the ten minute bus to the MTR (train) station and board for a twenty minute ride to the Fabric Street. That's right, no place like JoAnn's here. After following the guide book, we made the decision to exit onto the street that I thought to be the Fabric Street. After all, I had just visited this place the week before with several ladies, so I was sure I would recognize the route once I saw the streets.

Well, not so much. First of all, I had went during the week, when most people are holding down jobs. My family was shopping on a Sunday, when most of the millions of residents also shop in the open-air markets. We were engulfed in a swarm of people, who do not routinely see young, blonde children. It was super crowded, people were staring, the kids were hot. I realize at this time, I have no idea which way to Fabric Street, and no one in sight spoke English. Our kids decide, now is a good time to need to use the facilities...that is a story and experience all in itself. I left the public facility so traumatized by the lack of American hygiene, we walked down a random street, saw someone selling felt, bought fifteen yards and left. I am quite sure we weren't in the Fabric area, as this was one random street stall and the actual street has twenty different shops, but I needed to get the kids and myself home for decontamination.

The next weekend, we bravely headed back to the markets looking for the 'party supply' street. This was moderately more successful and we left in better sorts.

Back to the party...
We were lucky enough to have my parents visiting for two weeks in November, so we held the celebration while they could attend. In total, we had six adults and nine kids. We had a super hero obstacle course with toilet-paper grenades and a pillow gauntlet, target practice with ping-pong balls and water guns, and a capturing of a villain. The kids had a blast and were awarded with super hero training certificates at the end. C had a great time with all of his friends and was very happy his Dad and NaNa & PaPa got to share in his special day.



 As an educational note, HK is very accepting of various vultures and ethnicities since there are so
many expatriots. However, some of the working class citizens do not routinely encounter ex-pats because of our differences in geographical location, sight-seeing spots, and day-to-day differences.

And so it begins...

After telling everyone prior to moving I was going to blog our adventures in Hong Kong, I have failed miserably! Actually, when I arrived here, and researched creating a blog for the 'technical-challenged', I discovered it was more work than I was prepared to do at that time. However, I have stumbled upon loads of time these past two days, as I am on 'modified bed rest' for a septic knee joint...So I thought, I should start the blog! And here it is....

A little background for those that may not know our story..Mark and I were happily going about our hectic lives in small-town USA, when he suddenly came home from work and said something along the lines of 'how does living in Hong Kong sound to you'? I responded, 'not very European.' There are many spots throughout the world I have dreamed of visiting or living, however, Hong Kong was not one of them. Fast forward many discussions, we went on a 'looksie' trip here last February, and moved here in July with our two littles, C (6 year old) and E (4 year old).

We have spent the past 6 months settling into our new 'house', discovering the city, and filling our schedules with TONS of activities. The kids are both in school, in a British based system. They are doing fantastic in their school work and have caught-up to their peers. More on that later.

A great perk to living in a large city and in an expatriate community is that everyone wants to stay active. C is in a phonics and science club, plays baseball, football (soccer), and takes swim and basketball lessons. He is waiting for tennis lessons to begin, as well as, trying to learn some ping pong. E is busy with dance, gymnastics, and is waiting to take an art class. There are also weekly play dates with kids from the school and lots of time for the parks, scootering, swimming, and exploring.

Overall, our life is very different from where we moved for many reasons. Mark spends a majority of his time traveling Asia, so we do see a little less of him. However, I no longer work, so the kids see A LOT more of me, some days this is good, other days I question my sanity :) we have decent weather most days, so we have tons more outdoor time than before. Our main mode of transportation is our golf cart, no private vehicles allowed here. We also have trains, busses, and ferries at our disposal and use them for visiting different parts of Hong Kong that our not on our island, which is called Lantau.

The kids are receiving a fantastic education, and I am amazed at the things they realize and are exposed to that I am sure I did not know about at their age. For example, C's friends are primarily from Europe. He spends time weekly looking at a world map and placing the locations of their residence to various spots we want to vacation so we can visit them. He can say 'hello' in many languages and is learning some Mandarin. The school has food -culture days, where Moms bring in native dishes from their homelands. I always volunteer to help at school on that day...hello tiramisu from a multi-generation Italian recipe without the Americanized short-cuts! Anyways, C comes home and explains the origins of a dish and what makes it special. I am sure that when I was 6, I just wanted ketchup or dip, who cared if it was Danish or Italian or whatever!

I believe this is a good start and I need to change my frozen pea bag on my knee. Once I figure out how to post pictures in a timely fashion, look-out friends! I will also try to do more specific types of posts, once I get the hang of this so the posts aren't so 'word-y'.

Love from Hong Kong :)