Our plane touched down in Xining at around 2 p.m. today (yesterday now).  We were gone just 5 days short of a month.  It seemed strange to land here again, to see the mountains covered with snow all around our little valley, and to think of this as our "home" now.

Being back in our humble abode (which only months ago felt like a war zone to us) with our familiar furniture, condensation problems, and creature comforts (i.e. sofas, TV, Baba Zhang pizza oven, etc.,) reminded me of that comfy feeling of putting on well-worn tennis shoes after you’ve been cruising around in rented ice skates for an hour or so…

Home is home (wherever the locale…)

For us, Xining isn’t exactly home in many ways, but it’s perhaps more so than a plethora of hotels and guesthouses in Thailand (regardless of the ever-availability of 7-11 Slurpees there).  For whatever its worth, we take ownership of this nest we’ve created for ourselves here in Xining.

That’s not to say we didn’t have a good vacation.  We had a great time in Thailand!  I think when you feel you’ve had a good time visiting a place AND when you’re also happy to be going home, that means you’ve taken the appropriate vacation (both in terms of type and duration).  This is especially true when you’ve got young’uns.  It takes some energy to "take a break" with them…if ya know what I mean.

Anyway, my goal tonight was to post 5 or 6 pictures to give you a taste for what we did the past 3+ weeks, but I just got carried away and posted 30+ pictures instead.  Oops.  The sad thing is that I didn’t even bother with chronology of events or organization at all.

But that’s how memory works, too.  Thinking back on the past month different things pop to my mind and lead me to remember other things about our vacation.  Think of it as stream of consciousness.  I won’t bother explaining all the various places pictured below other than to say this.

The grandiose buildings pictured below are located at the Royal Palace in Bangkok.  The elephant riding happened in Hua Hin, Thailand, which is also where we enjoyed the beach, coffee drinking, and weight-gaining.  The panda bears are in Cheng Du where we spent two nights on our way back here to Xining.

Evidently, Xining didn’t get the postcard we sent bragging about the warm weather in Hua Hin.  We thought the city needed a little encouragement about warming itself up since Spring Festival is officially over now.  Not only is it not warm, there is also more snow on the ground now then when we left… Some cities never learn.

Thanks for your patience while I took some much-needed R&R. Looking forward to more language study soon.  I actually missed speaking Chinese when we were down in Thailand.  More stories in the days ahead.  My apologies for the long "upload" time because of all the pictures…