In case you didn’t notice, CHL is now publicly accessible. Please link and e-mail all you want.

Here’s the one important part: We do not want to be accidentally mistaken as potentially troublesome by people of consequence. Our intentions are explicitly apolitical. In order to not be misunderstood, it is important that people don’t associate our names or url with potentially troublesome terminology. So please link to us, but keep all that in mind. And please don’t use our last names. If you have any questions about all this, you can send us an e-mail.

So yeah, no more logging in. Happy? If you experience any issues with leaving comments or whatever, please let me know.

Tomorrow we take the kids (Koreans and Taiwanese) downtown for some sightseeing at Stanley park. Tough job…

Made it back just in time for Julia’s graduation. Here’s a photo with her date to the grad banquet/cruise/breakfast that the school does as an alternative to prom. Brian’s a Korean guy who was on her South Africa trip.

It’s Canada day, so the paper is filled with things that are supposed to make Canada look good and distinct, like this quote from Jane Fonda (yes, that’s right),

When I go to Canada, I feel this what the world should be like.

Toques, Tim Horton’s donuts, and polar bears made the top 5 “Reasons to Love Canada” list. Wayne Gretzky was #9 – right above salmon. I’ll refrain from facetious comments regarding national identity crises and inferiority complexes.

We really do like it here. The weather is sunny but not sweaty, it’s all green and tree’d, quiet, spacious… and I’m talking about Surrey, B.C. The locals disagree, but perspective is very relative: driving into Surrey from the airport I thought, “Geez, this place is so… undeveloped!” It looked like frontier territory or something, compared to Yonghe. We’ve been hanging out with extended family that’s here for Julia’s grad, nice and relaxing before the craziness of the ESL program starts on Monday.

In other news, CHL will soon go public – meaning no more annoying logging in and all that. I just have to clean up a few more things and make sure I don’t accidentally mess it all up in the process.

Look to your right – on the screen, not in real life – just above the weather (which is still showing a moon when it’s sunny here… argh!). We just added Chinese take-out!, where we’ll post fun things to say in Chinese – hopefully almost every day. Now you can practice on all your Chinese friends and co-workers! (And if you offend them, they’ll never let you know! =)

- You can leave replies to each phrase by clicking the date and time.
- Clicking the pronunciation will take you to a very cool online Chinese dictionary that has audio files of each word.
- To see all the Chinese take-out! phrases, click “Chinese take-out” in the Categories list in the left-hand sidebar.
- Starting now, you can mouseover characters like this: 我爱你 to see the pronunciation.
- If you are seeing computer symbols instead of Chinese, you need to either update your browser, enable East Asian languages, and/or ditch Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox!

For the inaugural phrase we picked “ma3ma3 hu1hu1″ (ma-ma hoo-hoo), for no other reason than it just sounds really funny when you say it. We were in Wen2-di2′s car (yes, that’s pronounced “Wendy,” and he hates it) with some others and were trying to catch the conversation when one of them used this phrase and it made us laugh. Lao3 Zhao4 also used it the day we were getting my hair cut. Anyway, there will be plenty more to come. And we take requests!

The previously mentioned rush of inspiration was only good for about 4 pages of that paper; I’m not sure if I should feel guilty about the other 8 or not.

Either way, we’ve got a little breathing room now to get our lives in order. Moving to Taipei + two weeks of Winter Camp + Hong Kong + grad papers =’d messing up our lives. Now – for the first time since we left West Texas in August – we can start a sane routine that should last for more than two weeks! It’s nice to actively and routinely engage our spiritual and married relationships, clean our apartment, stay on top of our assignments (more reading in the park!), get organized with the Mandarin learning, learn the local markets, get to know the food stand owners we frequent beyond their names, and hang out with our new Taiwanese friends! We do have time for all that now – this month even.

Some little things:
- new photos, video, and audio (on the photos and video pages)!
- If you haven’t yet ditched Internet Exploder for Firefox, now’s your chance. Firefox is safer, more secure, easier to use, faster… and CHL works better in it! =)

Greetings to all our friends and family and welcome to our blog! Please come back often and leave comments… Taiwan is a long way from home!

This site is created and designed to give our friends and family as big a window as we can into our China adventures. We want you guys to be as much a part of our experiences as possible. In addition to the stories and pictures, we’ll also occasionally post downloadable audio and video (once we have some worth posting!).

(This post updated 09 July 22.)