Well, we’re here.  Our visas are still in process, but hey, at least they’re in-process.  We have until the end of the month before they have to be renewed, but in China you don’t want to cut it too close.  So far we’ve done a lot of cleaning, reorganizing, and figuring-out of our new "temporary" home.  There have already been a lot of "firsts" in terms of new experiences. 

The girls have enjoyed exploring the spacious, overgrown backyard jungle.  We’ve all enjoyed the opportunities we’ve had to "get out" back and hike a little bit as well as find our way around town.  The weather has seemed a bit warmer than in Xining and the Chinese tones sound a little less distinct coming from predominantly Tibetan tongues.  But all-in-all we’re "surviving" just fine so far. 

Yesterday we sang praise songs with our team of 6 (including the girls) in the backyard under a tree’s cool shade.  We have plans to go to the library/cultural exchange center later this week to receive some training on library procedures.  Thanks for all the thoughts and vertical communication.

Some of the "firsts" thusfar:

• Battling a legion of "sow" bugs or potato bugs in our living room.  Luckily they die easily.
• Disposing of a live scorpion someone left us in a drinking glass.
• Having dinner in the home of a friendly, but ill monk.  My teammate spoke to him in Tibetan, he would then spoke back to his sister in fast Tibetan.  She would translate into Chinese and if I was really lucky I would get an English translation in the end.  I could follow most of the Chinese which made me happy.
• Eating yak yogurt.  It was tasty.  I piled on the sugar though.
• Fixing an electrical breaker in our home.  This is not something I’m qualified to do, but luckily it just involved changing out a wire and I had good training.  It was a shocking experience at times.
• Mixing flour and concrete in an effort to poison a rat.  Yes, we’ve already had a visitor.  A silent, unobtrusive visitor, but an unwelcome visitor nonetheless.  I am trying to incite a deadly case of constipation.  It’s not a nice method, but me and rats just don’t get along.
• Warding neighbors off of our roof.  Yeah they’ve been weeding their own roofs and wondered over onto ours. 
• Learning the ins and outs of "locking down" a countryside home.  You wouldn’t believe the number of padlocks protecting our home from intruders.  I have a janitor-sized key ring right now.  This sounds like we live in an unsafe environment.  We don’t!  But the homes here are pretty open if you scale a wall.
• Negotiating our way through a lady’s request for medicine.  She showed up at our front door and asked us if she could have some medicine because she couldn’t see and she was having head and heart problems.  Yeah, that was a bit tricky.  I haven’t prescribed meds in a while.  I did the Chinese thing and asked her to come back tomorrow or the next day so we could ask our friends if they knew her.  Mingtian.
• Grinding our own beef.  Christa is the hero.  She went to the butcher and asked for specific cuts.  Today we put them through a meat grinder for the first time.

It’s been interesting…