Beijing apartment secured

Annette just returned from a busy week in Beijing, and succeeded in renting an apartment for us near Peking University (Beida).  It's a 2 bedroom in a high rise, close to McDonalds!

She spent one day trying to wipe off all the soot that seeps into the apartment from outside.  Her right arm hurt afterwards, and she only got through one room.

Her friend at Beida is still seeing if he can get us into an apartment on campus, but we are grateful to have a place we can move into for now.

Getting the China visa is a huge bureaucratic hurdle, and we are still waiting for an official invitation letter to apply for the visa.  Last word, is it will take at least 3 weeks for the letter.  Uh, we leave for China in 41 days!

Annette was also debating about whether to bring air purifiers to China from US or getting them there.  Apparently due to the demand, there is a huge markup there, but the thought of lugging two more 30lb appliances around the airports doesn't sound like a great idea either.

Annette also met with the school directors for Samuel's kindergarten and Joshua's elementary school and it seems like that will be set as well.  Samuel's school day will actually be longer than Joshua, and we're a little worried the 9-5 day may be too long for him, and hope we can pick him up earlier.

Things seem to be coming to a close for us here in Boston.   We are trying to see people to say goodbye and to do our favorite things one last time before we leave.  This weekend, we had a great beach day at Crane Beach and ferried over to Spectacle Island for a clambake.

More Logistics

We had a change in plans and won't be returning to California before going to Beijing so when we first tried to change our tickets, we were horrified at the change fees and additional costs involved:  something like 97,000 additional miles, + $450 for our tickets, and another $900 for Annette's tickets.  Fortunately, an angel by the name of Angela Rose from United's ticket office in Detroit finally got us squared away for just $300, but we just have to make some tight 1hr connections from Boston-->Denver-->SFO--Beijing.

Sometimes it's nice to have a wife who has "command" as one of her strengths, per Strengthfinders.  She manged to lobby MIT to pay for our entire move to LA, which comes out to just over $17k!  Thanks Annette, I'm going to make a donation to your clothing budget!

Joshua is starting up his tutoring sessions in Mandarin, transitioning to learning Simplifed Chinese characters using this book series.  I am starting to step up my Chinese studying as well.  The tools available for learning Chinese now are incredible:  Pleco OCR,  ChineseWriter

We've given up on buying a home in LA right now.  The housing market is going through the roof.
Annette called one listing and just after a few days, they had already 15 offers, made 10 counter offers, and advised her to only make an offer 100-200k above asking price, and also, to come with cash.   Right.

Annette is headed out to Beijing this week to look for an apartment and to see if she can get our boys signed up for school at the primary school.

55 days to go until Beijing.

Tickets bought

We were waffling on where we should depart from, and what date to depart for awhile, but once we made a decision, everything else came very quickly:  tickets purchased, work end dates fixed, other summer plans decided, and here we go.  August 21 2013 will be our launch date.

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.