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atotaltaitaitale:

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The Spring Festival celebrations officially end tonight with the lantern festival 元宵节-YuanXiao Jie (15th day of the first lunar month).

Everything’s back to normal and everybody’s back to work.

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15-Feb-2022: D-124 before departure

Spring Festival (春节-ChunJie) is the official name of the Chinese New Year which technically should be called Lunar New Year since it isn’t celebrated only in China but also in Korea and Vietnam (Tet) and places with a significant overseas Chinese population.

But I guess calling Spring festival while we are still in the middle of winter is not really helping

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~~~Just a little FYI So for my last 200 days in Singapore I have decided to reblog, in no special order, a post from the 6 years I will have spent on the Little Red Dot. PS: you will then get 2 posts a day!!~~~

from Tumblr https://ift.tt/XVsZ4pw

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To wrap up my time in China, I stayed a few days in Beijing with my friend.

It’s a weird feeling to visit a place you’ve called home for a few years (twice 3 years in our case for Beijing). Everything looks familiar, as much as it can be with the very fast changing pace in Beijing, yet everything is different. You are not on daily routine mode, you are on tourist mode but yet you are not really the typical tourist.

What I liked about living close to the center in Beijing was that I could wander around different neighborhoods on my Vespa but this time I was constrained by taxi and my walking. But I did manage to walk 13 km that day; from Jinshang hill, around the Forbidden City to Qianmen with a little side tour to The Egg. It was a gorgeous day with blue sky and perfect spring temperature… just the way I want to remember Beijing.

There’s also the fact that a place is usually associated with the people you meet there and after almost three years of being away, and by the nature of our expat life, most of my friends have left. I did manage to catch up for coffee and lunch with a couple and had dinner on my last nights with a few more.

Will the China chapter truly be closed this time? Only time will tell 😉

from Tumblr http://bit.ly/2PnrzTk

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1,500th day in a row!!!!!

I posted every single day (sometimes several times a day! since it’s actually my 3,119th post) since August 4th, 2013 when we moved (back) to Beijing and I decided to start this little Tumblr/Wordpress blog. Didn’t think I would post every day that’s for sure!

I almost quit after we left Beijing a year ago because I didn’t think I would find interesting things to post about in Singapore; almost quit again after the first few posts about settling in Singapore but decided to at least commit to a year (I regretted not pursuing my first blog of our 1st time in China when we moved to Norway). I again almost quit a few months ago but then realized I was close to 1500 day in a row and over 3000 posts and couldn’t break the streak even if some days I bore myself (oh how much I miss Beijing and China for their endless source of subject – I even had a back log!!)

There are +/- 300 days until summer vacation…. let’s this be my next goal. 

Thank you for following along the ride.
To the loyal daily followers, to the ones I know and to the unknown ones.
THANK YOU 💋.

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2w53BFO

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When your Korean surrogate daughter wishes you Happy Mother’s Day.

Miss having you around the house… or is it missing having you around the corner so I could send my daughter to your house 😂

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Good bye Beijing it was nice seeing you again.
In the end it’s not only the place you miss but mostly the people you met there.

If only we could move countries and take with us not only fond memories but also the friends we made.
I have one in particular that I would ship with our belonging ;-). But hey like that we have excuses to meet up!!

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Life in the suburbs…part 2.

This is the kind of photo I cannot show my kids or they will think this could be a daily occurrence 😉

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Interesting enough there are almost more bicycles (like our first posting in Beijing) then when we left a year ago.

There were a lot more electric bikes (Vespa type) then.

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The chaos that is Sanlitun crossing (vehicles, sanluche, pedestrians, motorcycles, etc) is still in full swing.

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Life in the suburbs 😂

After dinner & drinks in town we stopped at the (end of the) Salsa Social in one of the cafe near my friend’s place. We have officially reached a milestone. A year ago we would have ended up our night in a nightclub with 25-year-old (the tennis coaches of her husband academy… don’t worry!).

We actually had fun (or is it we made fun?!)

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They might beautifying the city but some things never change.