We're here

After nine days, six airports and four hotels, we finally touched down in Shanghai 上海 late this afternoon. First impressions include: it's humid; the traffic is worse than in Taiwan; fried rice is pretty cheap; and our house is huge. I'll blog more on life in Shanghai once we're settled in. For now, here are some photos from our last stop (Narita 成田, Japan) before reaching China:

Taking a walk along Narita's Omotesandō 表参道 in the evening after checking into our hotel. Finding a place to eat at 7 p.m. proved to be quite a challenge.

Preparations were being made for the city's summer Gion Matsuri 成田祇園祭り, a three-day celebration that began the day we flew out of Japan.

I don't always eat nattō 納豆, but when I do, it's usually because it's available at the hotel breakfast buffet.

My daughter poses at the entrance to Narita's premier sightseeing spot, Narita-san Shin-shōji Temple 成田山新勝寺. In the background, food and souvenir stands are being erected in preparation for the festival.

The main temple building and pagoda of Narita-san

It doesn't get more Japanese than posing in front of a stone lantern fronting a pond in Narita-san Park 成田山公園.

 Narita-san's Daitō 大塔, built in 1984

Amber poses on Omotesandō. In contrast to the previous evening, more stores and restaurants were open.

Amber and I battle the traffic on Narita's traditional shopping street

Force-feeding a monkey rice crackers 煎餅 and Calpis Soda カルピスソーダ. The camera adds about thirty pounds or so to one's frame.

Amber checks out the carp in the pond at the Narita Excel Hotel Tōkyū 成田エクセルホテル東急. After years of transiting Narita Airport 成田空港 on her way between Washington state and Taiwan, my daughter was excited to actually see a little of Japan other than the airport.

The last night...

It's our last night in the U.S., and I'm spending it in the lobby of a hotel in South San Francisco, a short drive from San Francisco International Airport. We depart early tomorrow afternoon for Japan, where we'll spend the night (and the Fourth of July) in Narita 成田, before flying out to Shanghai 上海, our final destination, on Friday. I'm five months overdue in China, and excited to finally get started there, but saying goodbye to family and friends for the next two years is never easy. A few photos from our last two days in America:

My daughter gets her feet wet in Puget Sound, in Silverdale, Washington. With her swimsuit already on its way to China, Amber was jealous to see other kids having fun in the water, so I let her look for shells. I wish I could've gone in for a dip as well, but I was also unprepared for the surprisingly warm weather in the Pacific Northwest.

Flying back from Seattle to San Francisco, we rented a car at the airport and drove out to Davis to see some old friends. We took the long route across the Golden Gate Bridge, so the girls could have a chance to see it up close.

After driving over the bridge, we stopped at a lookout point for one final view of San Francisco and the bay before the long drive to Davis.

On the streets of Davis, home of the University of California at Davis, my alma mater. The town has changed quite a lot in the twenty-five years since I've graduated. No longer a sleepy college town, it was surprisingly busy, with more restaurants and bars than I remember from my collegiate days. Some things never change, however, like the summer weather - it was well over a 100° F out there this afternoon!

The real reason for making the trip to Davis today was to see my old friends Joe and Rich. We've remained in steady contact since our high school days, but this was the first time to see them in person in about thirteen years. I hope it won't be so long until the next time we can all get together.

The town has changed a lot, but the campus still looks the same. A lot of memories came flooding back as we walked around the school grounds. I ended up buying an Aggies football jersey to wear on my off days in China.

Amber poses at the vista point rest area in Vallejo along Interstate 80, a road I've driven many times between Sacramento, Davis, Berkeley, San Francisco and several points in between. My visit to California was too brief, but it was still good to be back home again.

What a long, strange trip it's been...

Halfway there...

Since finally passing the Mandarin Chinese exit exam on June 24, here's what we've been doing: I spent literally all of Friday evening following the test, plus the entire weekend, lying in bed and suffering from a terrible case of the flu. Unfortunately, this left the job of sorting through our goods up to my wife, who had to decide what would go by air, what would go by ship and what wouldn't make the cut at all. On Monday, I finally dragged myself out of bed, and somehow managed to make it down to both FSI and Main State in order to complete the check-out procedure. Afterward, I finally saw a doctor, who prescribed some heavy-duty medication, including Tamiflu. On Tuesday, the movers came and took everything away, including our car, to eventually reunite with us someday in Shanghai 上海. On Wednesday, we said goodbye to Falls Church, and flew across the country to San Francisco, via Atlanta.

Back in my native California for the first time since the dawn of the 21st century, last-minute meeting cancellations left me with an unexpected free day on Thursday to spend with the family. On Friday, we flew up to Seattle, and have been staying in Bremerton since then, visiting with my parents and my sister. We're here for one more day, after which we return to San Francisco on Tuesday, where we hope to meet up with some old friends in Davis. On Wednesday, we're scheduled to leave the United States, flying from SFO to Narita Airport 成田空港 in Japan. Following a one-night layover, we're due to arrive in Shanghai on Friday, beginning a new chapter in our lives.

Until next time, please enjoy a few photos of our slow journey to China:

Amber at Union Square in San Francisco

Getting ready to board a cable car

Alcatrazz Island

Discovering that the water of San Francisco Bay is still cold even in late June

Amber and friend before boarding the duck boat. I was leery about the proposition, but the girls wanted to take a tour, so we did the duck. Departing from Fisherman's Wharf, we were driven through North Beach, Chinatown, Union Square and Market Street, before plunging into the bay. There, we puttered past the Bay Bridge and over to AT&T Park, before doing a U-turn in McCovey Cove and returning to dry land. We made our way back to Fisherman's Wharf via Polk Street. Had we time, I would've preferred to have rented a car and spend a couple of days driving in and around the city.

The kids were allowed to drive the boat while it was in the water. Here's Amber in McCovey Cove.

Pier 39

On the waterfront in Bremerton, Washington

The jets of water are supposed to symbolize the salmon swimming upstream

Amber making friends with a corn snake at Bremerton's newest tourist attraction, the Bug Museum.

The Bug Museum was very reptile-heavy. My daughter showed no fear, asking one of the workers to take this skink out of its aquarium so she could have a closer look.

Do these look like submarine conning towers coming up out of the depths of the sea?

The USS Turner Joy, one of the attractions lining Bremerton's waterfront. The area has been greatly cleaned up since my parents moved up here in the early 1990's. Gone are the seedy bars and boarded-up storefronts, replaced by condos, hotels, museums and tourists.

With two of the other of my favorite women, my wife and my sister

Finally!

http://chinatravelholidays.com/the-bund-shanghai/

Finally!

After three extensions (one due to knee surgery) and one failed exam, I finally, FINALLY, managed to do well enough on the end-of-term Mandarin Chinese exam to pass the course, get off of language probation and start preparing for the move to Shanghai 上海. More than two hours after getting the results, I'm still in a daze, and not just because I have flu-like symptoms and have been feeling pretty damn uncomfortable since yesterday evening. I'm finding it hard to come to grips with the passing score I was given, considering that I felt I did much worse this time compared to the exam I took a month ago. I can think of four possible explanations:

1.) In my delirium, I didn't realize just how amazingly fluent I've become in the Chinese language;

2.) My score this time illustrates just how subjective the whole testing process at the Foreign Service Institute really is;

3.) Word came down from the top to pass me and get me the hell out of FSI as quickly as possible, no matter how much I butcher Mandarin;

or 4.) The testers made a mistake, and it turns out I actually failed (this wouldn't the first time this happened to me; however, I will say no more about THAT...). I'm leaning toward this explanation, which is why, during the post-test feedback session when I was asked if I had any questions, I quickly replied "No", and got out of there and to the Chinese section as soon as possible, both to report the results and to get myself signed out of the program before someone changed their mind.

http://www.chinaodysseytours.com/shanghai/the-bund.html

Now that I'm done with language training (fingers crossed), I can finally recover from 学中文-induced burnout, and get on the process of packing up our things and having them all ready for when the movers get here next week. The plan calls for a couple of days in San Francisco, where I'll have consultations with the Department of Homeland Security, followed by a few days visiting family in the other, nicer Washington. Then, following a night's layover at Narita 成田 in Japan (Yay!), we should arrive in Shanghai just after the Fourth of July holiday (in the U.S., of course), where I should be fresh, eager and ready to get to work the following Monday after resting up over the weekend.

That's the plan. Now that I've laid it all out for the world to see, no doubt some unforeseen disaster is waiting in the wings, biding for the right time to make its presence known.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shanghai%E2%80%99s_old_city.JPG

All this calls for a celebration, but I feel like  大条 right now, so I'll try to go to bed again this evening. Hopefully, if I feel better tomorrow morning, I can do one last hike before the serious job of getting ready for the movers begins. Shanghai, apparently, is pretty flat and the walking options are limited. Oh, the sacrifices one must make in the service of their country...

In lieu of a celebratory feast, I offer you this apropos oldie:

Falls Church Five-O: Happy 生日/誕生日to me

Yesterday, Flag Day, was my birthday, and I might as well admit the truth: I've turned fifty years of age. I hope this means I've entered middle age, and that I'll live to a hundred and beyond, but only time will tell. For my birthday, I gifted myself earlier this week with a hearing aid. All those years I'd been complaining that I couldn't hear things clearly, only to be told I was making excuses, have now been determined to have been based in fact: the hearing in my left ear is so far below normal that it has finally warranted needing to use amplification. It goes quite nicely with the new pair of reading glasses I acquired a couple of months ago. There's nothing like aging gracefully.

To celebrate this gap day between my birthday (yesterday) and Father's Day (tomorrow), I treated myself to a hike. In recent weeks, I've been trying to build up my knee strength by upping the ante when it comes to weekend walking: a few weeks ago I returned to the trails on an "Easy" route, according to my AMC's Best Day Hikes in Washington, D.C. guide (Cosca Regional Park in Clinton, Maryland); the following week, it was an "Easy to Moderate" trail (Antietam National Battlefield); and last week I tackled a "Moderate" path at the Manassas National Battlefield Park. So this week I sought out a trail dubbed "Moderate to Difficult", which turned out to be Sugarloaf Mountain in Dickerson, Maryland. To be honest, though I was huffing and puffing during much of today's hike, especially near the end (the result of age, being out of shape and the ongoing recovery from knee surgery), Sugarloaf Mountain was hardly "difficult", at least not in the sense that Old Rag Mountain was. In fact, it was a very enjoyable four hours and 5.3 miles (8.5 kilometers) on a not-too-hot sunny (but shady) afternoon.

Starting out on the Green Trail, which led from the parking lot at Sugarloaf Mountain to the summit. I was a little leery at first - my hiking guide talked of a sharp ascent over granite rocks, and when I saw people climbing up the sides of a rocky outcropping using ropes, I wondered if I had made a mistake. It turned out they were learning how to properly scale rocks, and the path to the top (a short walk, as it turned out) remained much like what is depicted in the above photo.

The view from the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain, 1282 feet (391 meters) above sea level. The view was actually very impressive - the pictures I took from the top didn't do the vista justice.

The view is presented in somewhat better fashion in this self-portrait

A couple of zoom views from the top. The waterway in the first picture is part of the Monocacy Aqueduct, constructed in the 1830's.

After checking out the view from the top, I soon made my way down to the Blue Trail, a circuit five miles (8 kilometers) in length that eventually made a loop back to the parking lot. The terrain was always changing, with plenty of ascents and descents, and some switchbacks. At times I was in dense forest, at other moments I was passing through small clearings. During the nearly four hours I was on the trail, I encountered quite a few people, yet there were long stretches when I had the mountain to myself. There were plenty of bees, birds, butterflies and lizards, but no deer, though I did see some tracks in the mud, and at one point heard the sound of a large animal running through the woods.

This old cairn stood on the 1019-foot (311 meters) summit of the mountain's northern ridge, and was a good spot to have lunch. From here, I made my way over to the White Rocks, an overlook offering a North View and a South View. First, the North View...

Two long-distance views...

A close-up zoom-in view...

Another self-portrait...

...and a video.

For the South View, I repeated the pattern:

From White Rocks, it was a long walk back to the parking lot. Though I was starting to get pretty tired by this point, my knee was holding up well, a very encouraging sign.

The last photo is the view through the trees from the parking lot. Next weekend, I'll try one of the "Difficult" hikes. Seeing as my last-chance Chinese exam is next Friday, it'll either be a celebratory walk or a scouting trip for a suicidal plunge over a steep cliff. In any event, I'm going to miss the scenic rural roads like those I drove along on my to and from Sugarloaf Mountain today.