Easter Wekend in China

Easter greetings! Actually, Easter weekend in China is not very different from any other weekend, so it has been good to tell our Chinese friends about how we celebrate it in England, including the flying of kites on Good Friday. You didn’t know that was an English custom? Well, it is in our part of Cheltenham!

Last weekend was cold and the blankets we thought we had put away for the summer were back on the beds. This weekend is warm again with hot sunshine mixed with thunderstorms. Good weather for rainbows. One thing Yunnan has in common with England is the totally unpredictable weather!

We had heard nothing from Andrew Hay since the death of his mother following a fall in a storm at sea on their trip to Scott’s base hut in Antarctica. Her father had been part of Scott’s team which was the reason for the trip. Sadly, she died a few days before arriving at the base hut, so Andrew had to complete the pilgrimage without her.

Several weeks later the ship arrived back in Auckland and, with considerable difficulty, Andrew was able to make the arrangements for his mother’s cremation and to obtain the necessary paperwork to take her ashes back to Spain for the memorial service, a job which was completed only hours before his flight was due to leave.

On the flight from New Zealand to Thailand, Andrew developed deep vein thrombosis in his right leg and was unable to walk for several hours, so he rested in Bangkok for 24 hours before continuing his journey to Spain, exercising vigorously all the way. After the memorial service, he and Anna were planning to take a few days holiday in Spain before returning to Norway, but severe chest pains put Andrew in the hospital trauma ward with a pulmonary embolism resulting from the DVT. He came out of hospital last week and has been banned from flying for a few months so cannot go back to Norway for a while.

He had planned to come out to Kunming in May which would have given us the opportunity to discuss progress on the water projects and make plans for the future. I had hoped that together we could recruit a local person to continue making the circuits for the UV light water purifiers after I leave at the end of July. Something we need to be thinking about. We are still hoping Andrew and Anna will return to China before we leave.







Another of the many examples of Chinglish we see every day. Can the dogs read?