Quick update before heading back out
After we found fun in Chendgu, we flew back to Beijing and had a few more days before school started back IN PERSON!! (Yeah!)
The boys did some puzzling, Celia caught up with friends at the local coffee shops, and I planned a last minute after Chanukah Chanukah party and fried dozens and dozens of latkes.
The Chanukah party ended up being a blast! Lots of friends showed up. I thought it might be small with Covid but I think everyone was ready to get back out after such a long couple months. Our friends the Rubins brought two beautiful home made challahs. We lit the menorah and said the prayers over the wine and Challah. We then gave an explanation about Shabbat and Chanukah as this was most of our guests first exposure to Shabbat or Chanukah. Before dinner we had an all in dreidel competition. In lieu of gelt, I bought two large bags of Chinese candies. It was definitely the biggest dreidel game I’ve ever participated in. A few minutes into the game we noticed that the wooden dreidels two of the tables were using always landed on Gimel – which means the spinner gets everything in the pot. It was super fun – despite the fact that I was knocked out in the first round. Our friend Jason one and brought home the framed dreidel.
After dinner, we had a gift exchange. I had asked everyone to bring two things from their home that they no longer loved but someone else could. In the tradition of Dan’s family, everyone got two chances to steal other people’s presents or pick a new one. Super fun.
Afterwards we had dessert, then as the party started to wind down, our friend Michael pulled out his guitar and we sang songs. A nice marker of the rough times behind us and hope up ahead.
New Years Day Dan, Morton and I headed down to The Summer Palace to go ice skating on the lake there. Morton’s missing his easy access to the skating rink at Prospect Park and we heard the Summer Palace is a great place to skate. Only a half of Beijing had the same idea. After waiting in traffic a while, we decided it would be faster to walk there. At the gate, I slowly communicated with the woman selling the tickets that I just wanted tickets for us to skate. I gave her our passport numbers – no idea why we need passport numbers to skate – and then she told me all skating tickets were sold out for the day. VERY FRUSTRATING.
We took a little walk while the driver caught up with us – he was still caught in the traffic. We decided to go down to BeiShiDa – the Beijing University where Dan lived in the mid 90s and taught foreign exchange high-school students at the high school across the street. We were unable to get onto either the university or the high-school campus and Dan had trouble recognizing the neighborhood – like most things in Beijing – it had completely changed. But he did take a picture outside the school where he taught and we enjoyed ourselves walking around and going out for lunch.
After a couple weeks of searching, and underground connections, we were at last able to get our hands on some at home Covid tests. The kids and Dan tested and finally got back to in-person school on January 2nd! That first week was a major challenge for all of us to get used to waking up so early again but despite that we are all happy for the return to in-person.
This past weekend the Boy Scouts also returned to in-person and Morton went on an in-person ice hiking trip.
Meanwhile, Celia, Dan and I went downtown to an old Hutong area that have the old twisty windy streets to a restaurant that had been recommended to me when we first arrived. When you all come to visit we have to go back to this restaurant. It was so yummy! We wandered around trying to find it and eventually went into a restaurant we thought might be the one. We asked someone for the Caidan (menu) and the person asked if we were looking for the Jianbing fanguar (pancake restaurant) – which we were. He then lead us back outside and around down a few little alleys to a small sweet looking restaurant. There we ordered these incredibly thin pancakes that the waiter showed us we were then supposed to slowly pull apart into two even thinner pancakes. We then ordered fillings, we got an eggplant- mushroom one (the yummiest!), an egg scallion one, and a mixed vegetable one. You put these on your thin pancake and eat it like a small burrito. So good!
Afterwards we walked around the neighborhood for a little while before heading back home.
We just decided to take a quick trip up to Harbin, a town in the north east of China this weekend. There had been a large Jewish community there from around 1810-1950. We’re interested in seeing the old synagogue and other Jewish sites they have preserved there, plus Harbin is supposed to have one of the most amazing Winter Festivals in the world. We are told after this weekend it’ll be too crowded with so many Chinese traveling for the Spring Festival so we decided to go at last minute as Celia can’t wait till next year and really wants to see it. I hope to give you an update on that trip soon!