Christmas in Maryland

Merry Christmas! I'm back in the US for the holidays. I had not posted anything for a few weeks since I was getting busy for my trip. There were a few things that happened in that time (besides work and packing)... One weekend I went out looking for some gifts to take back with me, but ended up spending too much time looking for Zhu Zhu Pets. A friend of mine named Angel helped me look for them, but we never found any.

Angel took me to see a movie at the theater in Wanda Plaza after our fruitless search for toys. We saw the movie Treasure Hunter, which has a lot of big name Chinese stars. The story was sort of silly, but the special effects were good. The next weekend I took Angel out for dapanji, and Reese and her boyfriend joined us. That was really good since I had not had dapanji in awhile. I took Angel out to dinner the evening before my trip back to the US. It was Dong Zhi (winter solstice), and most Chinese around Chengdu like to eat lamb, dog, and/or dumplings. Angel didn't want any lamb or dog meat, so we had fish hotpot. It was a wonderful dinner to have before going on my trip.

My flight back to the US left Chengdu at noon on the 23rd, and I had connections in Beijing and Chicago before landing at National Airport in Washington DC. The flight from Beijing to Chicago landed late, as we kept circling around waiting to land. After I got through customs I had to check my luggage back in, and I checked on the status of my flight to DC. since the flight to DC was scheduled to start boarding 10 minutes ago, I figured I was going to miss that flight but that flight was delayed too. I had to wait around Chicago airport for a little over 2 hours before our flight finally took off.

It was nice coming back into DC. The skies were clear and the city and surrounding towns were all lit up. It looked really beautiful. There was snow on the ground too, and I had not seen that much snow in several years, so that was nice to see. When the plane landed it was a little after 11:00pm, which was around noon back in Chengdu so I had been traveling for 24 hours. My parents picked me up and we drove back to their house. We saw about 5 or 6 deer outside my parents neighborhood during the drive. I wish I could have gotten a picture of them but it was too dark, and I wanted to get to the house and get some sleep.



Today is Christmas and I'm just relaxing today. My brother Jay and his son Nicky are flying up this afternoon from Raleigh. Can't wait to see them. This will be the first Christmas that the family has all been together in 5 years, so I'm really looking forward to it. You all have a great Christmas!