OK, I was pretty young when these Calgon commercials were popular. Most of you reading this are goinng, "Huh?"

Nevermind.

We’ve been here in Xining exactly 2 months today. It’s our month-a-versary! It’s hard to believe it’s only been two months, but I guess we technically have been away from our culture since July 3rd.  So, I guess we’ve been away from "home" about 4 months in total.  But we also were living in other people’s apartments/homes for the past two years, so it’s hard to gauge how long we’ve been on the nomad trail…maybe forever?

There have been many days on this voyage where I’ve called out to the mystical powers of Calgon to just take me away.  I think life is just like that sometimes.  Add a few stressors, a language barrier, and never-ending home improvement project into the mix and you’ll definitely become an escapist at some point.

For Christa and I, lately we’ve been maintaining sanity in the strangest way.  We’ve been watching the TV series Alias in the evenings after the girls are asleep.  Our Norwegian friends have the entire first four seasons and we just finished watching the second season.  It’s not a very spiritual undertaking (and the plot and believability of the show is a bit of a stretch  for me), but it definitely helps us wind down (or get wound up?) after those long hard days of thinking too much and too hard.  It’s a nice way to not think and to relax a little bit in the soft and comforting glow of global terrorism and cloak and dagger espionage.

Don’t ask.

Anyway, Christa told me the other day (since you don’t get her perspective very often in the yeti cave) that it was good for her to be alone running errands in the city.  Seeing the people and the place we live, in that context (without having to keep eagle eyes fixed on our girls,) allowed her to remember why we came here in the first place.  It was a good way to gain perspective and realize the positive aspects of our little adventure here.  It’s easy to get lost in the chaos that life often rolls out for us like a red carpet.  It’s harder to walk across that carpet, smiling at the papparrazzis and enjoying the glow of the camera flashes.

There’s beauty in the experience–even in hardship.  And  if required (for the most part) you can always take a hot bath at the end of the day–even in the Two-Thirds World…

p.s. Our leak may have been fixed…things are looking up.