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Patty and a cast of 12 other artists have an opening for their upcoming show in 798 today. Patty isn’t just exhibiting, she’s also the curator! It begins at 3pm – if you’re in Beijing, come on by!

Well off they go, to rendezvous with our friend Glodee in Bangkok and thence to Thimphu and a subsequent hair-raising landing in Paro, for a 10-day trek through what many people consider the most beautiful country in the world. I’ve tried to collect a map of some of the locations they’ll visit at the bottom of the post, but of everywhere we’ve visited in Asia and elsewhere, you’ll see that there are just no roads, landmarks, or anything else to mark where they’re going, making this by far the most remote. We’ll just have to wait for the pictures.

View Patty in Bhutan in a larger map

Hello People! Since I graduated from Daystar Academy, I’ve moved to Harrow International School, which is the same school that Carl attends. It’s a lot different from my old school, but I still like it. At Daystar we spent half of the day speaking Chinese, both in and out of class, and the other half speaking English. But although Harrow is 80% Chinese kids, we aren’t even allowed to speak Chinese outside of Chinese class – I guess that’s because the school has a many Chinese students who are trying to improve their English, but also because many of the teachers wouldn’t know what we were saying!

Another difference between the schools is that at Harrow I have 11 different classes, but at Daystar I only had 4. It’s funny though, I seem to have the same amount of homework. I’m not really sure why they insist we take so many subjects, but I think it has to do with sampling many different topics so we know what we want to take in the higher grades, and as we begin to think about studying for our GCSE and A-level tests.

We left Thanksgiving behind a month ago, and in China no one notices it anyway. So while Patty and the kids and I shared a lovely Thanksgiving in Beijing, it was a small affair this year, with a few friends and no other family.

So we had to wait until Christmas to create the ultimate celebration, and here we are now with my sister Jesse and her family, doing a family holiday the way it’s supposed to be done. We’re all helping a bit, but it’s really Jesse’s show, and while she does a remarkable job with anything domestic, holidays really bring out the showoff in her. Thus everyone is utterly stunned with food and gifts, and ready to head off to our mini ski vacation tomorrow in the Rockies.

And so I find myself full of thanks for so many things right now: my sister and her lovely family, my wife and our remarkable kids, and the great fortune we’ve all had to be part of each others’ worlds.

Despite only a trace of Scottish blood in my veins, and Patty’s coursing with its Irish near-opposite, we attended last weekend the St Andrews Ball at the Guo Mai hotel in Beijing. It’s quite a scene, there’s nothing like homesickness to stir patriotic zeal and cause middle-aged expats to want to square dance and eat haggis.

I could continue in this manner for some time, but I don’t really want to write about the ball. All I wanted was an excuse to post this picture. And that’s not so you could see the first tuxedo I’ve ever owned in all its carbon glory, but rather to show off my charming, accomplished, beautiful, radiant wife.

Patty finished her first half-marathon in Beijing today, clocking in at a little less than 2:20 on a beautiful blue autumn day. She sported the colors of the Swedish Running Camp she’s been part of for the last 12 weeks or so, and finished strong and beautiful after 22km near the Zhichunli Subway stop in Haidian.

The day started with a 6:15 wakeup for a carpool to the 9am start at Tiananmen Square. Afterwards we met the kids and Patty’s friends Tenzing and Melonie at one of our favorite Beijing restaurants, Dali Courtyard, for a celebratory lunch of mostly vegetarian Yunnan style food, before she took the guests on a studio tour around the 798 art district. What a day, just writing about it makes me tired!

Congratulations sweetness on your fantastic performance!

The Gaba got an A* on the Mathematics GCSE he took at the end of last term in year 10. For those who didn’t go to a hoity-toity British Public (private) School like Harrow, that means that not only did he take it a year early, but he aced it! The whole family is thrilled, and I’m taking this opportunity to brag and embarrass Carl because he deserves attention after all the hard work he put in studying, and the pure awesomeness of this grade:

For our massive, but largely American readership, the GCSE is the modern name for what used to be called O levels, and passing marks the successful completion of the first phase of study in a school based on the British educational system. After that, it’s the GCE Advanced Level (A-level).

Nellie completed the 6th grade on Thursday, graduating from Daystar Academy (启明星) with three others (Ashley, Reese, and Gus) as the senior class of 2011. She joined Daystar in early 2008, which at the time was a very small school of just over 30 students, run out of a converted house in the Northern Suburbs of Beijing. Three years later, it’s a fast-growing school of over 120 students, with its own beautiful campus, an evolving Chinese/English curriculum, and a great future ahead of it. We’re all going to miss Daystar – in her three years there, Nell went from barely speaking Chinese to 5th grade level in reading, writing, and speaking. At the same time, she developed her academics like math in both languages, and learned how to crank the homework like a real pro. Congratulations Nell, we’re all so proud of what you’ve accomplished!

Next year, Nellie will join Carl at The Harrow School, which will vastly simplify our family schedule, but also give her a chance to get some regular Western curriculum under her belt. We can’t wait to see her success there as well.

I grouped these days into one entry because they weren’t quite as eventful as the others. That’s not to say they weren’t interesting or valuable, but for both of them we worked entirely on our last task, which was finishing our spreadsheet of Service Providers and writing reports. On Thursday we thought that we would finish our assignment early, but the last few details (like ARPU) proved much harder to find and ended up taking us the full 2 days to finish. For lunch we went to Subway, where the staff constantly screwed my order up, and once gave me soda water instead of Coke. Continue reading →

On day 1, Wang Wei had told us to go to the Research and Development center on Wednesday. Since the R&D center was on the other side of Beijing, we took the subway. We got lost again looking for it, but ended up finding it right underneath our noses. Well, 300 meters west of them, actually, but in plain sight. Continue reading →