Stokes in Peru

Greetings All, And Happy Holidays to you, wherever you are finding (hopefully) rest and relaxation during the holiday season.  We happen to be in Lima over our winter break and I thought it an opportune time to update you on how we have been doing since this blog was last updated, shortly after our arrival to Beijing and China. Daybreak view from our apartment: It's been nearly five months since we made our most recent move and it has certainly been an adjustment for us.  We knew that when leaving Dhaka we were departing our spoiled life, but there's a difference between realizing and experiencing.  Our school put us up in a condominium for the first two months of our stint in Beijing, which meant we were apartment hunting, the first time we had that experience in nearly eight years; eight years was enough time to forget the unpleasantness of trekking through hovels and negotiating outlandish rents, but it came back to us through several fruitless excursions into the teet

Greetings Everyone, And once again, hello from the other side of the world (for most of you).   However, this time our flight was a relative breeze, as travel time encompassed a mere 24 hours from Lima to Beijing; in our days of living in Dhaka, we could anticipate a minimum of eight more hours of transit, so we felt fresh as a spring shower when we landed in Beijing (okay, a slight exaggeration. . .). Anyhow, I wanted to provide a quick little update on our travels, to verify that we indeed did arrive and to give you a report one week in Beijing.   Firstly, the new jobs-we are just shy of ecstatic that we have landed at this school, Western Academy of Beijing.   From the beautiful campus (photos to follow at a later date) to the vibrant learning community, Marianella and I feel as if we have arrived at a special place to work.   Of course, the honeymoon is early and being the grizzled veterans that we are, we aren’t getting too ahead of ourselves, but we are excited, which i

February was always the longest month of the year for most of my life-the winter doldrums, combined with an uneventful sports calendar, and every single person's least favorite holiday made the shortest month seem interminable.  The shift towards associating positive thoughts towards February began when Marianella appeared in my life (hey, Valentine's Day isn't so bad!), gained momentum when we moved to Peru (summer vacation!) and has certainly moved into the range of being a pretty good month (we'll see what my thoughts are next year when we're experiencing a real winter again in Beijing). This February ranked pretty high on the chart, due to several short getaways, both far (Portugal*) and near (a day trip to Bangladesh's old capital).  Have I piqued your interest?  Hopefully so. . . * So, Portugal happened in late January which is pretty much February anyway, right? Lisbon Along with two of my colleagues at AISD, we attended the International Sc