Checkin' In

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 teeth of Beijing's rental agents.  After much frustration, we landed an apartment located on the 25th floor (I find myself humming the theme song to The Jeffersons on occasion) in an area a short walk from the aforementioned condos of our first two months.  We have made it homey and quite comfortable and one of our favorite activities is to have dinner and watch fascinated by the traffic inching along the boulevards below (yes, indeed, we are an old married couple).
Photos from 798, the art district in our (figurative) backyard:




Rafael Nadal, serving doubles at the China Open in October:

Outside of settling in to our residence, we have also been trying to figure out Beijing in small nibbles along the way.  We are constantly marveling at the sheer massiveness of the city-whether on the streets, the subway, or the airport, we struggle to comprehend its size.  The immensity bears out in the numbers (21.7 million residents in an area of 6,300 square miles), which ultimately has lead us to experience the city in our relatively small area between home and work.  We are fortunate in that the area we are residing offers a lot-within a short walk, we can enjoy Chinese, Western, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Italian, Indian, Mexican dining, while also having a vibrant art district when we turn right or the comforts of a modern mall when we turn left.  Our favorite destinations thus far have been two traditional Chinese neighborhoods with markets and food stalls spilling out into the streets.  Beijing can feel awfully impersonal when you're trying to keep with the flow through the city, but we find welcoming smiles when we head to the market on Sunday morning or when I get my haircut.
One of the countless food stalls, working late into the night:

Our Sunday market:

The ominous black chicken; we've yet to indulge:

Another "not yet" experience-open air dentistry:

Gratuitous cute baby photo:

The splendor of autumn at a nearby park:

It's still too early to give an appraisal of what life in Beijing is like; between work and getting settled, our exploration of the city has been limited and has been impacted by the haze of pollution which unfortunately has seemed to be most prominent during the weekends.  We have been fortunate in that the air of Beijing has gotten considerably better over the last few years and on many days the skies are a brilliant blue.  However, when the pollution comes heavy, it is tangible-you can feel it on your skin and it also settles on the psyche, gazing out to the smog-filled sky.  Even though we've entered winter, we wish for a good breeze-we will choose a bracing day at the bus stop if the wind pushes the pollution out of the horizon.
This is a bad pollution day (cold too!):

The prettiest shot on our school's campus, after a dusting of snow:

I mentioned a departure from our life of leisure and it's probably felt most in our commute to work.  In Bangladesh, we had a five minute walk door-to-door from home to school; now, we find ourselves hustling to the bus stop in the morning for our half-hour commute (if traffic is flowing).  We are still enjoying the novelty of squeezing in amongst the locals, but even more so, we love the price-it costs us about 30 cents each to get to work each day.  In the afternoons, we are able to catch a school bus home, so on a good week, we are spending $3 for our transport to work.
A fellow bus rider, heading home from the Sunday market:

The latest in Marianella's award-winning series (in my eyes, at least); an exhausted laborer on the subway:

What lies ahead for us in 2017?  Well, we're hopeful to explore more of this vast city and try to get out into the surroundings of the city a bit.  We have our first excursion to Europe together in late January, when we visit Portugal while the Chinese celebrate their New Year.  And honestly, we are looking forward to arriving back to Beijing to our own apartment and the routine that we began establishing in the last couple months of '16.

Take care everyone and we wish you a Happy 2017~Tim & Marianella