Hi everyone! Or dajia hao as they say here. I just spent seven fruitless hours working on a 2,000 piece puzzle so I'm hoping the posting of this blog is the antidote to total, crippling self-loathing :)

Since we last talked, I visited the Summer Palace (in Beijing) and a village called Cuandixia (about a 3 hour drive from where I live). Both jaunts were amazing, and I’ll share some photos from the Cuandixia trip in my next post. For now, the Summer Palace (a.k.a. Yiheyuan. Sort of pronounced like ee-huh-you-ann).

We went with a group of friends two weekends ago on a perfect weather day. We hired a guide who asked us to call her “Square”—a nickname she told us she earned with her physical shape. We protested, and she showed us a picture of herself that was supposed to illustrate her former squareness, but that to us looked pretty normal and not "square." So don't let her name fool you! Like a lot of young people in Beijing, her style was on point—her shirt had a torso-length black and white picture of Marilyn Monroe’s face on the back and she carried a purse with a picture of Audrey Hepburn on it. The park was crowded, but it was no sweat keeping track of Marilyn. Side note on fashion accessories: most women here carry parasols to protect their skin from the sun—a fact that I, a religious SPF 150 user, very much appreciate. One downside is that parasol-dodging becomes a full-time job in crowded public places :)