In Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring

     For Chinese Labor Day, we visited our grandparents and relatives again in Fuzhou.  We rode the High Speed Rail there and back. This time, the weather was warmer than last time (and there were lots of mosquitoes, too).  We also stayed in our grandparents' apartment again.      There are three rooms in the apartment. My younger sister and I share a room.  This is our bedroom window.  The patio on the right side of the window is where we hang our clothes to dry.      This is us (I'm taking the picture), walking to our grandparents' apartment.      In their apartment, my grandparents have a small box filled with old money.  I think the one on the right was ration tickets, but I'm not sure.      Here are some more old money. My Dad said these were the money that they used when they were little.      I asked my Dad if these were worth anythin...

Continued from the previous post: We moved on to the next section in the amphibians exhibit. There, we saw many snakes. Here is one of the bigger snakes. This is another snake, who is inside the water. This snake looks very nice in his white and brown stripes. The snake here is all coiled up.  It isn't easy to spot his head. There was a crowd around this snake's tank.  He looked like he was about to strike the mouse in his tank, but we didn't get a chance to see it. This is the biggest snake that we saw at the exhibit. He/She shares a tank with another large snake.  In his tank, there were many dead and uneaten mice on the ground, which looked quite disgusting.  We also saw him suffocate a mouse and swallow it. In the picture, he is eating the mouse. We finished looking at all three floors of the amphibians exhibit, and we decided to go see the monkeys. We focused on the lemurs the most.  They were very active and pl...

On Tuesday we went to the Beijing Zoo for my sister's birthday. We rode the bus there. When we arrived, we decided to visit the Amphibians exhibit first. There, we saw a few crocodiles and alligators. We also saw a Chinese Giant Salamander. There were also many turtles and tortoises in the exhibit. Here are a couple of my favorites: This is a razor-backed turtle. He is not very large. His shell is probably around 6 inches long. Here is another small turtle. He's about to drink water. This turtle is also not big. He's really cute. Here's the same turtle from a different angle.  I like the expression on his face. In this tank, there are two turtles, one on top of another.  The one on the top looks like he is posing for a picture. Here is a very unique amphibian. It's called a Matamata. We also saw many toads and frogs: I happened to be taking a picture when this toad was eating a...

It’s snowing in Beijing!  Even though the temperature is quite cold here (at least compared to California), it rarely snows because the weather is dry.  We were all very excited, since snow comes about once a year in Beijing.  After we finished our homework and studies for the day, we went outside to play in the snow.  The snow was very thin, but we still had a lot of fun.  My sister wrote her name on the snow. My brother wrote his Chinese name on the snow. There was snow on the benches and on the bicycles, too. A cat left some footprints in the snow. We made small snow cupcakes by pressing snow into a cup, and then taking the packed snow out.  On one of them, we added a small snow strawberry on top. On another, we added some snow icing. We also played catch with the snow cupcakes we made.  It was not easy, because the snow often crumpled to pieces if you didn’t catch the ball the right w...