She decided that there were too many reasons for her to continue life in Vancouver. I can relate to that of course. So we decided that I should end my latest Dalian venture. On June 3, 2009 I was packed up and moved back to our humble abode at 3660 SE Marine Drive.

Consequently I decided to move my blogging from Spaces back to wordpress.com http://robertg69.wordpress.com and that's where I have been since and should remain for the foreseeable future.

This week Emma (Wen Yuan) and I have been living without Kelly (Yu Wenwen), her daughter. Kelly left on Monday for a 6 day trip to the US, Washington, Oregon and California, with the String Band from Killarney Secondary.

I found a new image from Suzhou this week:

At 7 AM next Friday (Oct 21), I will be finishing my packing and preparing to take the taxi to the Dalian International Airport. There I will board China Eastern to fly back to Vancouver via Shanghai. Since that plane will be crossing the International Date Line, I will land in Vancouver at around 11AM Oct 21 Vancouver time.

Yuan has been living there since this past August 20. On Sept 1 she moved into our new Vancouver home. (see photo below)

Readers of my blog may be surprised at the brevity of this entry. The fact is that I have been feeling more and more China-ed out since Yuan and her daughter left. It is very humbling for this cynic to admit that I need to be with another person. But that is the new fact of my life. Adventure is not enough anymore, although I can easily make a case that living long term with Yuan and Wen wen, my stepdaughter (photo below) in China, Canada or wherever should certainly be an adventure in life and living. And I look forward to all of that!

It's here ... our web portal site!

As of yesterday, 2005/7/23 we have the beginnings of our Services portal. It is at http://sinowesterngroup.com. Very modest beginnings, but it's that the first step on the next "long journey".

This is an important point in our time. I will likely use that portal to publish some of my writings and use Google and Yahoo ad clicks to make it visible to the world!!

Right now it's early in the AM on Sunday, the day after, and I am not feeling very voluble. So I will forego more comment here, but I do feel something special has started. But if it is to be, it will be up to us.

Another thing happened yesterday! Kelly may have another entry point to her "music career". That has to do with a telephone conversation I had with Sanford B and Gordon Gray, one of Sanford's Beijing buds. Gordon G is in the music business, in an underground way. He has a sound studio and also has a 16 yr old daughter who has ambitions for a music and TV career. She wants to collaborate with a maker of original pop music who is close to her age and does her music in Eng/Chinese. And that's Kelly with a little help from me for the English composition part, or so I think right now. Time alone will tell what this means Stay tuned!!!

And I got a neat new camera phone, made by Lenovo, which cost about $200 CDN!

She twisted and turned to the last, especially when the envelope that we expected to get before 2:30PM finally got to us at 4PM or thereabout. She insisted on tearing the large brown envelope open. After all she set out on her quest for it in December 2002. How could anybody blame her for sweating, twisting, turning and doubting until it was whole and entire in her own hands?? Not I, who accepted to support here in this and all ways!!

I had celebrated over Roast Duck lunch, but her heart wasn't in it. So I am very happy for her and her daughter now.

Who is she? Just my lovely wife, Yuan and her sweet very cute daughter Wen wen (photos below)

And now we are waiting for mid-July or earlier to book our return to BC. This time I return fully loaded with Yuan and Kelly. So BC watchout for us!!

But our stay there may be short, or about 50 days or less. Although there is a plan B that involves Y & K staying there while I return to Dalian for the beginning of the next school term or March 1, 2006, or something like that.

Our decision is conditioned by what happens to Kelly for her high school entry here in China. If she gets into the special actors High School in Beijing, then our stay in Vancouver must be as short as we can make it. Maybe they will return while I stay in Vancouver to finish our business there.

Of course, the length of our stay in Van will condition where home will be in Dalian when we return. If Y and I return to D then we will be looking to buy a place here. Yes, back into home ownership in the long Chinese tradition of not wasting money on rental.

I will be making a much longer post about our visit to the Immigration Section and to Beijing with some good photos added. But that will be a bit later. So look out for it.

Meanwhile yours truly will be working on my trip to Nanjing/3 Gorges and Shanghai in August, some other China biz stuff, and prepping to be published (hope springs eternal, in China!!) in the quality mag, That's China. If that gets started then my future career as a paid travel writer begins sooner than I expected!! Who knows what lurks in the minds of men?

I guess that I just indulged in a bit of absentmindedness. I left a pan on the stove and thankfully Y came back and saved us from a “fire”. I got into too many things here and forgot that I had started to warm some water in a pan that I wanted to clean. Oh well, I continue to be imperfect and that I hope is not to sluff it off but admit my accountability and weakness. When I get wound up here and with the music, time disappears around me.

I can’t say too much about how happy and fulfilled I feel these days. Is it China, is it her, is it me? Probably I finally am making better sense because of the effect of the China situation on me. I will not be the first person that this has happened to. I have a new project to write stuff for the That’s China magazine with a direct referral of my stuff to the Chief Editor from a Chinese student of his!! Wow, I even have a great (according to me) piece to send him. Expat observations about the way public works works in China like it does in many other countries as I have observed. So I will pdf my doc and get off by email. I will spend time with my contact, Mark or Qiang Sun, at I-55 brunch buffet tomorrow AM.

Everything or almost seems to be working. I have even found, or I think that I have found a Web business model which is different and should work. It is connected to this idea of Y and I doing some introduction stuff, as well as facilitating Chinese students to Canada and ESL teachers to China. I will try to use Poul’s portal platform to set up several partly connected content and interactivity portals beginning with “How to deal with Chinese women” and going into whatever direction the muse and the market pulls us.

Yesterday was a good day at the school. I didn’t feel I was doing specially brilliant work but I was doing personal communications work and I was getting very positive feedback from the kids and my co-teachers, the Chinese ones. So this is triggering a lot of stuff.

Then there is the marriage of mind, body and soul with Emma/Yuan. Things couldn’t be much better. We seem to be on the same wavelength about so many things, business, family stuff, food, entertainment, how to get things done, supporting each other when either feels needy (oh that happens!!). So life is beautiful!! And Dalian looks nicer and nicer with the green trees and grass and the bright warm sun mellowed by regular breezes from the sea. So folks things are great here in Dalian.

We are even talking very constructively about how we are going to spend the next 2 to 3 years. We will come back to China, but not earlier than April 2007. So the next step is getting back to BC, which we expect will be before Dec 1 this year.

The local 5 star hotel, the Furama, was celebrating an Alaskan Seafood Festival for the last week or so. Y and I decided that it was as good time as any to celebrate the day a year ago, April 16, 2004, that we first met on a park bench by Englsih Bay in Vancouver.

We did not splurge in a too spectacular way. The buffet lunch which was quite good cost us about $50 CDN. When we got home we found that CCRA had sent me a GST rebate cheque which nicely covered the cost of our celebration. Life goes on.

I have added a photo of Yuan, who is much prettier than I. I also gave in and put a pic of mine in. These pics were taken at the Furama during our small celebration.