Misty

During the entirety of our time in China we have not seen much rain and had grown accustom to dry weather, well all that changed about a week ago.  It almost seemed as if the turning of the calendar also flipped our ecosystem.  Back home people say April showers bring May flowers, but we had the flowers but not the showers.  It turns out they just come a little later in this little corner of the Earth. With the beginning of June the clouds rolled-in, which in fairness is a little difficult to decipher through the smog, and the humidity has gone through the roof.  I could give some physical descriptions of how that has affected us physiologically but that just doesn't seem to be in good taste.  Good taste, I must be maturing!

The other big events of the past week have included the booking of our flight and the beginning of preparations for our return.  I previously lamented the amount of time we had spent tracking flight but finally we found a flight that will get us home and it'll do so on the 22nd of June.  If you count the days you can see we are just under the two week mark.  Hard to believe. 

Given we have been working all this weekend and are off on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday for the Dragon Boat Festival we only have eight days of work left. (It's currently 7:30 on Sunday morning, so that eight days is counting today and we are serious about our counting.)  We had five days off until we were invited to go a trip with some of the teachers to Shandong province over the 14th, 15th and 16th.  So that leaves us with three days and we have a wedding to attend on one of those days.

Now this trip came out of nowhere last Thursday, but almost everything that has happened to us over here has seemed to come out of nowhere.  I was in between classes at my branch and one of the English teachers asked if I wanted to go to Shandong province over the specified days.  As I couldn't recollect where that was but in general if someone asks me do I want to go on a trip somewhere my policy is to say, so I said that sounds great but we better find out if Julie wants to go.  I was told they would have some ask her and that was all I heard of it until I returned to the center school.  Upon returning Mr. Wang (he taught us the English song for the long-term reader) tracked me down and let me know he need my passport number to book the trip (apparently Julie did want to go, I had to assume as I hadn't seen her yet).  We were also informed that, "not all the teachers got to go on the trip, only party members were allowed to go" ... "and foreigners" I had to add.  So it appears we are off on a Communist party junket.

Oh, back to the title.  It has actually been misty the past week or so, but as we have found in Beijing the smog will always persist.  The two combine to make one gray and borderline depressing vale over the world.  Yesterday I was reading an article reliving a departing journalist time in China and he recounted how when he first arrived in Beijing in 2007 they didn't have smog it was just misty all year round.

Hope this finds you well,
Ryan