Styling Librarian Hong Kong Update Catch Up 1

It is a challenge to catch up on over two months of activities in a few posts (because I enjoyed a month of posting about our adventure into China over Chinese New Year holiday), but here we go:

In the last two months, we had major events at home such as moving to a new apartment and my having two surgeries. I’ve been back at work now for a few weeks and am doing well. Two major medical crisis in one school year feels a little extreme, but that’s how I roll I suppose. Grateful to be around and recovering from my talented surgeon’s work.

Liz Million Author/Illustrator Visit

At school we had a few special events: book giving day, book character day, author visit with Liz Million, Skype visits with Patrick Carman and Tara Lazar, and many special readers in the library as well.

I’ll share catch up posts for the next few weeks. Our family will be going on a major two week adventure journeying into China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. We’ll have many night train journeys along the way in addition to many other modes of transportation… so I expect this catch up on life activities will be the closest posts there will be to “real time” updates for a while. I am pretty certain that these two weeks coming up will be many, many posts. Which isn’t a bad thing!

Catching up with our family:

First off, yarn bombing is quite amusing. I noticed it at the top of the steps I walked up and down every day, had to snap a photo… cute little mushrooms at the bottom.

Next, my coworkers and I went to support a former staff member’s new restaurant/bar that opened up- in Central, called Gweilo Bar and Grill. Had yummy food treats and a variety of drink selections. The buy one-get-one-free deal worked out quite well. Hong Kong friends, check it out: http://gweilohk.com/

There is a very specific reason that we don’t have any other pets beyond our sweet dog Dulcie: Dulcie herself. She was a nervous wreck when my husband brought home Peanut, the long haired guinea pig, from one of his school’s year 2 classrooms. Such a cute, mellow little creature. I used to own a hedgehog for numerous years and adored him… fun to visit with another creature for a weekend… But for around a week afterwards, our dog Dulcie prowled our small apartment checking the place from corner to corner to make sure that Peanut wasn’t there anymore. Fun visit for our family to distract us from the move that was looming over our heads the following weekend!

Interesting to try out a local dessert place that’s speciality was to make egg custard in an egg shell. Doubt this would be sold in the US with all the regulations around there but boy this was darn yummy and a pleasant surprise. Fun to explore new places and try things we normally wouldn’t venture towards…

Moving… moving… moving…

Big announcement: We decided to stay at Hong Kong for two more years beyond the original contract. So, I signed a renewal to work at my school for two more years, thru 2016. We’re excited about this change. It is incredible to experience life here. I’m at an incredible school that I love working at, my son is thriving, and my husband is enjoying Hong Kong as well… hard to not return to Oregon, we miss family and friends there, but we feel like we’re not done here.

So, since we’re happy and staying for a few more years, we decided to move to a different apartment. We had a wonderful apartment opportunity that opened up so we grabbed it and moved over to Causeway Bay. It was terrible timing and a little bit of a struggle to move when we did, but we’re now settled and happy here in a larger apartment with friends in the same complex… Really special to feel settled and a little more at home.

We said goodbye to the construction that our apartment faced and that we lived with for 1 1/2 years. That didn’t make me feel too sad, ridiculously loud some days, especially weekends… We hired a wonderful moving company to pack us up and move us over to the new apartment. It worked out pretty well, moved in and unpacked from a Saturday afternoon to a Sunday evening.

Old apartment:

New apartment:

We found a restaurant that’s become our new healthy “go to” restaurant… YUM. Vietnamese Pho place:

Then the next day I went in for surgery. Took 10 work days of rest and then I went back the following week… I still am being careful but really grateful for life’s opportunities, good health care, insurance, and a caring patient administrators and colleagues.

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