Well, hello there!

I feel like I must re-introduce myself.  My name is Kara.  And I live in China.  Still.

We did not fall off the face of the earth, just moved our family.  It’s been a whirl-wind 6 months and we’re getting settled into our apartment, the girls are enjoying their new schools and we got a puppy.  Bring on the chaos!

As I mentioned in my last post, we fully intended/believed that we would be moving back to the United States this summer.  Needless to say the move to Xi’an was a bit of a surprise.

Let me take a moment to introduce to our hew city…

Name: Xi’an (pronounced something like “She ahn”)

Population: At least 8.5 million people (which is roughly the size of New York City)

Fun Facts:

• One of the oldest cities in China
• It’s the oldest of the Four Ancient Capitals of China
• It is the start of the famous Silk Road
• It is the home of the Terracotta Warriors
• Xi’an people love noodles.  Generally speaking the people in the southern part of the county eat rice with their meals.  For those in the north, it is noodles.  

Beijing is in the NE corner of China.  Suzhou (our home from 2011-2015) is by the big red arrow.
Our new city is 2.5 hours inland by plane (by the blue star).

(All my facts are from Wikipedia because we know that everything we read on the internet is true.)

I am looking forward to getting back to blogging and introducing you to our new city.

We're Moving!

After a few (okay, many) weeks of uncertainty, we are able to officially announce that...

As my dad quickly pointed out, "That's not in the US."  No, we are not moving back to the United States as we thought that we would.  It seems fitting that the first move to China was a complete surprise to us and so when Jamie was approached about a position in Xi'An we were equally surprised.

Xi'An is most famous for the Terracotta Warriors.  So, if you've been waiting for one more excuse to come visit us, I think you've just found it.  From what we have learned, it seems that Xi'An is a larger city than Suzhou, but the expatriate population is 1/2-2/3 smaller.  I think I will be saying goodbye to some of my favorite creature comforts in Suzhou!

Over the next month we hope to visit Xi'An and find our next apartment/home, decide on a school, pack up our Suzhou apartment, finish the school year at Dulwich, say goodbye to  our Suzhou friends and then unpack a few boxes in Xi'An.  The tentative plan is for me to be in the US with our girls for the month of July.  We'll see how that pans out!

Emotionally, everyone seems to be doing pretty well.  It was a shock to us all because we honestly believed that there was a strong chance we would end up back in the US.  However, at one point Jamie was looking at positions in 3 continents, so we knew that nothing was a given.

The morning we revealed our next city to our girls, we toasted daddy and his next job with sparkling juice.

We put out our miniature Terracotta soldiers as a clue to where we were headed next.

I guess that means the overseas adventure continues and maybe this blog too.