We have the rest of this summer to pack our stuff, decide what little we need to take to Beijing, what else to send to storage in California, find a place to stay in Beijing, get the China visas sorted, and the boys schools situation settled.
Annette has a done a lot of leg work around looking for schools for the boys. Hopefully there will be spots of our boys to attend the primary school attached to Peking University. It's a school for the children of university faculty, and it's not the typical Chinese school apparently. It's not all rote memory and grueling seatwork, but they do schedule breaks for eye exercises.
We are hoping this experience will not traumatize the boys to Chinese culture and language, but hopefully will open their (as well as our) eyes to the culture(s) of the 1.3 billion people in China.
We've done a lot of looking onine, it's amazing what you can actually see on Google Maps of another city, and doing Youtube searches. There is an apartment complex close to Peking University that a lot of students and visiting scholars live at: Huaqingjiayuan Apartments that we are eyeing. When Annette goes out there in July, we hope to find a place that works out.
When I saw this article in the NYTimes, I almost freaked out and decided against taking our kids there for a year, but after doing some more research, I was more reassured that going was not going to cause real permanent lung damage to the boys. We'll have to bring or get some good face masks and air purifiers.
