The Family O' Blevins

We've finally gotten internet up and running in the apartment! There is a lot to write about, so we'll get down to business. On Sunday the 1st, Ethan went into the city to meet up with his Chinese friend living in Beijing, Dragon. Dragon had taken it upon himself to find us an apartment, and so he'd already scoped out a place. They visited the apartment, and after approving it, they went to a dingy Century 21 office and the landlord tucked them away in a small fluorescent lit cigarette drenched conference room where the landlor and Dragon yelled at eachother in unintelligible Chinese for awhile (yelling is a normal, amiable way of communicating in China, seriously). Documents passed back and forth, and Ethan came out figuring he'd either been sold an apartment or sold into a human trafficking ring in Thailand. Turned out to be the former, so we moved in the following day. Ethan's mom's cousin (is that once removed?), Billy, helped us get situated. That night Katrina stayed home and got things situated while Ethan went shopping at Carrefour, a multi-level shopping nightmare with crazy music, scary meat, and lots of bodies. But it's cheap. We shopped there three days in a row. It's about a 20 minute walk from our apartment. Then we took a taxi to Wal-mart, which was a dramatic improvement.

The apartment has a washing machine, bath, microwave, refrigerator, and a huge flat screen tv. It also has a single electric hotplate for cooking, end of story. Katrina's been learning to cope with that. Fortunately, it is literally no more expensive to eat out than it is to eat, so we do eat out a lot.

Ethan started work last Thursday. So far he has cataloged the closet and done some research on public defender standards in other Asian countries. Things are slow right now, because employees are still on vacation from the spring festival.

Speaking of the spring festival, Beijing is like Normandy on D-day during the holidays. Fireworks seem to be the primary means of communicating their holiday cheer here. Anyway, last night was the Lantern Festival, and we were afraid that Chloe was going to go deaf. It's fun to watch though. Every evening since we've been here except tonight has been punctuated by blasts from fireworks and firecrackers all over the city. Their main form of fire safety is placing a whole bunch of fire extinguishers out all over the streets. There is no single designated area for fireworks, they just go off everywhere, no matter how big they are. A major hotel under construction burnt down last night because of fireworks.

Chloe's been doing great. She's on a good schedule now. We've just started to lay her down awake and let her put herself to sleep. Works like a charm, and she's sleeping a lot more now.

There's lots more to say and it will be said, but we're stopping here for now. Chloe's apartment tour wasn't complete, but we thought we'd put up in here now anyway. We're having a lot of fun, and we're excited to be here. We'll write much more very soon!