Happy Birthday Pete!

Pete and I have had a great couple of days. Yesterday we went into an area of town called Stanley, which has a great outdoor market and lots of fun restaurants that look out onto the water. We had so much fun walking around and exploring. Pete picked out a couple of birthday presents for himself - it's pretty difficult to buy something on the sly when you go everywhere with someone :)
Today is Pete's birthday, so we celebrated by going out to dinner at the floating restaurant called Jumbo. You can actually see the restaurant from our apartment and we decided tonight was the night to try it out. You have to take a little ferry ride to get out there. It was very fun.
These were taken before we got on the ferry.


It started pouring rain during dinner ... this is my attempt to catch the rain in a picture. It's actually kind of fun when in rains like that - as long as you're not caught in it :)

They came to our table to make the noodles. Pretty cool.

Here's some pics of the decor at the restaurant.


Finally one last shot from the ferry dock. What a cute birthday boy!


Now on to some pictures from our Sunday in Stanley:
A view from the top.

I love the look of this dock.

Another view of the bay.

This is the line of restaurants - lots of places to eat. We had fish and chips, but we'll definitely be back to explore other venues!

A picture of me in front of my favorite dock.

Some boats on the bay, a fisherman, and relaxation ... awwww!

The First Day of School

Believe it or not, but this is Pete and my fifth first day of school together - time flies! Of course, our first, first day of school together we were probably not even officially dating yet, but whatever, I count it anyway!

The day went smoothly, the kids seem great, and overall it was a good day.

A picture of Pete and I - as you can see, I am getting huge. I feel huge. I am waddling. I am very ready to have this baby soon - as soon as she's big enough and her lungs are healthy, she can come whenever she wants. Especially in this heat it would be nice to be a few pounds lighter!!!!


This is my co-counselor Bob, his wife Jennifer, and their two daughters, Megan and Sarah, who go to the school and are modeling the school uniform for us (today was their first day of school). They live in our complex and are fantasic! I'm looking forward to having some good babysitters nearby, as well!


This is a picture of all of us on the bus in the morning. The bus picks us up, takes us to school, and brings us home at night, which is wonderful. The only bad thing is that the bus picks us up at 6:47 AM - way too early for this redhead!


This is Mitch, one of our fellow teachers who is also new to HK this year. He and his wife, Rebecca, are great!


Well, it's 5:37PM currently. We basically just got home from work, so that's an 11 hour day! Wow! I'm tired! I think I'll lie on the couch for a while an flip through the five channels that are remotely interesting. Pete's being sweet right now and went to the store to get me some water. I love that guy!

Our new home!

I'm home a bit early today because we had a new table arrive from Ikea. Our place is finally starting to feel like home (even if all the walls are white and bare currently). We need to start traveling, so we can get some decor! Take a look:
Here is our bedroom. It has a tiny little bed and a desk for the computer. The last picture is of the view - very nice to wake up to every morning.


Next, the baby's room ... good thing she's small because there isn't much to it!


A lovely picture of the bathroom. Actually, the bathroom is currently one of my favorite rooms because it has a little color!

On to the kitchen. The washer is really a washer and dryer combo. This works if you do laundry everyday and keep the loads super tiny! (Tiny seems to be the way to go in HK).


Our new table!

Finally the view from the living room. I forgot to take a picture of the couch, but it is cream colored and we bought some brown pillows to go on it. It actually looks pretty nice. As you can see in the bottom picture, we also have a nice little window seat to sit and look out at the water.



We have one more work day left before kids arrive. I am still not really in work mode and my office is a huge mess currently. Oh well, it will all work out (that's my motto these days). :)

Internet - check!

Sorry for the brief lack of blogging there. It took us a while to get settled into our new pad and get everything set up. Let's see ... where did I leave off ... hmmm ...
We had meetings at school all last week, which reminded us that we are actually here to work and not just to find places to live and figure out the city. I've had several meetings with my co-counselors and they seem like a good crew. I will be the counselor in charge of the 9th graders, and in addition I will work with all students who will apply to U.S. universities. It seems like my job here will be a combo of my job in Seattle and my job in BG. There are only about 75 students in the senior class at the school and the majority of them end up going to college in Canada, so I will have far less letters to write this year, which is great news considering I will be having a baby in the heart of letter writing season. Hopefully she will hold off a couple more weeks and give me a chance to get organized and meet with the students I need to.
Pete is teaching geography, English, and drama to 7th and 8th graders. He has a great classroom with lots of supplies and lots of technology set up. He'll meet with his team this coming week, as they are all returning teachers.

As part of our orientation last week the administration took all the new staff to a restaurant on Lamma Island, which is a short ferry ride from Hong Kong. It was a great seafood place and what a meal! Here are some pics.

A picture of Pete at the dinner table - I am sure he loves that I put these pics on the blog.

Some other new staff members that were sitting at the table with us.

Look closely ... there are fish in tanks floating around back there. Keep this in mind as you scroll through the pics.

A tray of shrimp - yum!!!!

A lovely fish, who just minutes before was floating around happily in one of those tanks in the background. Poor fish. He was really tasty though. :)

I forgot to take pictures of our new apartment during the daytime, but I will do that for the next post. I gave Katy a tour via Skype today. For those of you who don't have Skype, you should get it! We can talk for free over the Internet and, if you have a webcam, we can see each other too! It's great. Just go to www.skype.com and press download - it's pretty cinchy!

Waiting for Internet

Hi all! This is just a short note to let you know that we are all moved into our new apartment and we really like it. Our internet and cable are coming Friday evening, so we have limited access to the Internet until then. All is going well so far. I think we are going to make our second Ikea trip this afternoon and stalk up on some more goods. :)
More this weekend!

Getting Started

I'm too sleepy right now to write much, but I'll give a short update: This morning we were picked up and taken to the school for the first time. The school is very cool! 14 floors, I think, beautiful architecture, lots of computers and other technology. Very cool. The counseling center reminds me of my old school back in Seattle and so far I like my co-counselors. The school helped us set up cell phones today, so Pete has finally moved up to this century and has a cell phone for the first time in his life. Yeah! We were also able to set up our bank account at HSBC today, which is nice. We went to the main office building downtown, which was huge and looked like a building out some futuristic, sci-fi movie. It was crazy. Tomorrow we will sign the final papers on our lease and, if all goes well, we should be able to move into our apartment tomorrow evening - at least I hope we will be able to.
My favorite part of today was that we met a couple who just had a baby in Hong Kong 4 weeks ago. They went through the public health care system, like we will do, and they were very happy with everything. Apparently Queen Mary hospital is the best there is and the place to have babies, so I feel pretty good about that.
O.K., my eyes are closing - it was a very busy day. We miss you all!

Our New Home!

We have an apartment! With the typhoon warning over, we were able to go out exploring with a rental agent. We found a cute, little (and when I say little I mean TINY) aparment in a place called Sham Wan Towers located very near our new school. It's super small, but we think it will be enough for the three of us. There is two bedrooms, although the bedrooms are about a third of the size they are back home. What sold us was the view - it looks right out over the harbor. It's really very beautiful. You can do a little exploring if you want at http://www.shamwantowers.com.hk/script/tc/main.php It's all in Chinese, but just click on any of the links and you can explore some pictures. It has a pool and a gym, as well, which is a nice bonus. Here is a picture I took from the website. Sham Wan Towers are the the three high rises pretty much in the middle.

After we signed the paperwork, Pete and I did a little exploring around our hotel. We ate lunch a dim sum restaurant - it was really good. Here are some pics:


Hong Kong is teaching me how to embrace my curly hair - well, actually I'm going to have to learn to embrace it or I will simply be miserable for the next two years. It has been raining non-stop since we got here and it is so humid that pretty much anything I do to my hair in the hotel room is undone about two steps out the door. Oh well!
I think Pete and I are going to venture out to Causeway Bay tonight and try to catch the Bourne Ultimatum. I hope all is well with everyone - we miss you!

Typhoons

Typhoons ... so far I like everything about Hong Kong, except typhoons. Pete and I got up early this morning and went and got our Hong Kong ID cards. Getting this card was essential because without it I couldn't make an appointment to see a doctor. We successfully got our cards and then came back to the hotel and I made an appointment at the hospital for 11:00am this Wednesday. After hanging up with the hospital, I proceeded to call a rental agent and made an appointment with him to look at apartments this afternoon. I was so excited until we were about to leave. The phone rang right before we were going to head out the door and it was the rental agent telling us that we should stay in the hotel because the typhoon warning had been raised to 8. So, we have spent the last five hours in the hotel room just sitting here. I have not noticed a typhoon, although I have been looking out the window. Grrr ... Anyway, hopefully tomorrow we will be able to go out and explore the world of apartments in Hong Kong ... I hope, I hope, I hope.
As you can see, I have used this wasted day to update the blog. I'm still having issues with putting our picture in the heading. It always turns out blurry, but since I have spent five hours working on it, I have decided to give up.
By the way ... don't worry about the typhoon warning. An 8 just means to stay indoors because the winds will be high. Luckily for us there are two restaurants in the hotel. Only an hour until they open. Yeah!
:

Toto ... we're not in Bulgaria anymore!!!!!

We've arrived! First of all, praise Jesus that I did not go into labor on the plane - one worry out of the way, now onto fifty thousand other things to accomplish. My poor husband, however, did not have such good luck on the plane. He is running a temperature, feels horrible, and threw up on the flight (sorry, TMI - I'm sure he'll love that I reported that). He seems to be feeling better this morning, however, so hopefully he is in the mend.
We've only been here about 9 hours now, but I can already tell you, I'm impressed. The to the hotel from the airport was spectacular. This place is HUGE! There are tons of high rises, everything is clean (YEAH!!!!), the roads are spectacular, and drivers follow the rules. I love it! When I woke up this morning I went to have breakfast and the servers spoke English (another YEAH!). The, to top it off, I went to the 7Eleven (yes, you read correctly) across the street and bought Pete some Gatorade! They have Gatorade here! I also noticed the have Dryer's Ice Cream - both unheard of in the Balkans!
Here are the first few pics of our Hong Kong stint. The top two are the view from our hotel room and the last is sick Pete eating toast with his Gatorade.
We miss you all ... from what I can tell so far, however, all of you really may want to visit!

Making Use of a Long Layover

Pete and I are sitting in Vancouver, B.C. right now, anxiously awaiting our flight to Hong Kong. We had to get up at 3:30 this morning to make it to the airport in time for our flight. Now we are sitting in the VIP lounge (very nice - I highly recommend it) and now that I've had a few z's, I've decided to make use of some of our wait time. Below is the short and sweet recap of our fabulous summer, that I SOOOO wish wasn't over yet.

It all started in Mallorca, Spain with a fabulous vacation with my Mom and Dad:

This is a picture of the beautiful church in Pallma.

My cute parents looking out over a amazing blue bay.

A fantastic view from our drive around the island.

Our paella dinner at a great restaurant by our hotel - delicious!

Pete and I on the boardwalk in Soller - next time we all agreed we'll stay in Soller.

When we got home from Spain we gave ourselves just a short time to adjust, then we headed to Seattle. I can't tell you how wonderful it was to see the familiar faces of the friends we love. Thank you, also, to Molly and Sous who gave us a wonderful baby shower!




After Seattle, we headed back home and spent a great weekend at the beach with Marge, Norm, Andy, Ali, Brady (the cutest baby ever!), Mom, Dad, and Katy.




As you can see from the last picture, Pete got lots of practice with a baby this last month. Now we have our own Baby Bjorn and I think we're both feeling as ready as we'll ever be :)

After the beach we visited my grandparents in Coos Bay - it was SO good to see them. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures while we were down there. They are simply two of the greatest people I have ever met - I am so lucky to have them.

Other non-pictured events were BBQ's and a graduation party for Sydney, who is now officially a nurse! We are SO proud of you Syd!

Overall, it was such a great summer - I am so sad that it went so fast. Fortunately, this time around it won't be too long before we we're back home again - AND, when we do head home next time we'll be bringing our "new little friend" (as Pete calls her) along with us. We are so blessed by friends and family - it is impossible to put into words. Thank you all for making our summer grand!

I'll leave you with a picture I just snapped of Pete reading his USA Today in the lounge - we only have about two hours left (ugh!).