Not Done Eating Lotus Flowers Yet

You may be wondering what we'll be doing after we finish visiting Joel's parents in Santa Barbara. (Or maybe not, but I'll tell you anyway.) Our plan is to go to Beijing and, if all goes well, stay through the 2008 Olympics. No teaching this time, though--we're going to do all the traveling we didn't get a chance to do in Korea, and we're going to study Mandarin.

We actually had hoped to leave this week, but we've had a glitch in our plans: Our passports got lost in the mail on the way to the visa agency. We registered it and did everything you're supposed to do, but somehow the package just never got into the system. They have no record of it in the system and it hasn't turned up at the return address or the agency, so it's apparently lost somewhere in the USPS Bermuda triangle.

Our birth certificates are on their way from Iowa and we'll expedite the process to get new passports, and then it takes about 4 days to get the visas, so hopefully we'll be ready to go in 2-3 weeks. It hasn't been a fun experience, but we did everything we were supposed to do, so maybe the universe is trying to tell us that we just weren't supposed to go to China right away.

In any case, we're making the most of our time in Santa Barbara, so there are plenty more posts on the way this week!