Getting back to "normal" life

*This was a blog post I wrote 3 weeks ago, and forgot to publish, oops*

This week, we finally had some good news. Our Residence Permits came! That means we're officially chinese citizens. JK, we're not. But it means we can come in and out of the country as we please. These permits are good for a year, but I'm told that the renewal process is much simpler than the original application. Thank goodness. In total from start to finish, the entire process took 4 months! We started mid-May, received the temporary visa mid-August and the permanent one mid-September. Holy cow. 

For those of you who are new to chinese things, every fall they celebrate Mid-autumn festival to celebrate the lunar harvest. Part of the tradition includes eating mooncakes. Mooncakes are dense pastries made of bean or seed paste, surrounded by a buttery crust. Eric and I have now received a few mooncakes as gifts, but the picture below was the first. It looked so fancy in its packaging that I wanted to document it. But then I took a bite of it and wanted to puke. I had one tiny nibble of the piece on my fork and that was it. Apparently there are sweet or savory moooncakes and we got a savory one. It had some weird dried meat in the bottom and it was not delicious. One of Eric's coworkers encouraged us to try a sweet kind. We did and it was much better. It probably won't replace brownies or cookies for me, but I can appreciate why the chinese like it so much.

Some random products we like from china. Eric really thought
Arm and Hatchet was entertaining. Any guesses as to what it is?

We went to a park by our house the other day.
It was really pretty, a lot of walking paths and ponds

This was in the middle of the park, it's gigantic.