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NickF

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  3. How often do you go back to china to visit your family?

    in Stateside

    Posted

    tsap seui

     

    Thanks for the kind thoughts. I went through four years od increasing dementia with my father before he died, so I know what ChunMei's going through. her mother was beginning to experience symptoms at the time I first met her parents, and didn't have much interaction with me. Now ChunMei says she asks when I can come visit. I'm going to try to make the trip while ChunMei's there this spring.

     

    As or her father, he such a nice man. He speaks no English, so I've always communicated with him through ChunMei, but I felt comfortable with him the first day we met. When ChunMei took me to their apartment the first time I visited China, he was watching TV. The family socialized for a while (ChunMei has 3 sisters and a "brother" who is actually her cousin.) Then the ladies went into the other room to talk (about me, of course,) leaving me alone with her father. The first thing he did was change the TV channel to find a program with English sub-titles so I would feel more comfortable. That's when we bonded.

     

    Later ChunMei taught me the Cantonese phrases that I used to ask her dad permission to marry his daughter. He'll be 94 in January, and I'd seriously like to seem him live another 15 years at the least. He's had 2 strokes, and can't get around as well as he did when I first met him, but mentally he's as sharp as he ever was. When he dies it will be a little like losing my father again.

     

    Now with ChunMei going back for almost 5 months, I'm hoping that I can go visit for a couple of weeks in the spring next year when the Nanning weather's decent.

  4. How often do you go back to china to visit your family?

    in Stateside

    Posted

    ChunMei goes back at least once a year, occasionally for an extended period. She's leaving this time on 11 January, and won't be back in the USA until 25 May. Her father will be 94 years old in January, and her mother is almost 80, and is in the early stages of dementia, so I certainly don't begrudge her wanting to spend whatever time she can with her parents. She's also said that when her parents die she might not go back to China at all, especially if her son can come here occasionally to visit.

  10. New GPS for the wife.

    in Stateside

    Posted

    I have a somewhat older Nuvi 255W that speaks and displays Mandarin. ChunMei doesn't drive, but likes to listen and watch it when we travel because it helps her become familiar with local areas. I purchased the lifetime updates package a couple of years back, and installed the local app on one of my PC's. I get notifications whenever there's a map update. I haul the GPS inside, plug it into a USB cable and tell the app to update. That's it.

     

    I have the USA and Canadian maps installed, but a couple of updates back the maps became too large to hold both countries, so I had to buy a SIMM card in order to load everything.

     

    I have noticed that sometimes there are routing issues. For example I regularly drive between Denver and Dallas, and the "fastest" route calculation adds about 250 miles to the trip. If I plot the route in segments from Denver to Raton, NM, to Wichita Falls to Dallas not only is it shorter, it's also faster than plotting directly. I reported this to Garmin a year ago, but it still happens.

     

    In any case the lifetime map updates ($80 when I bought it) is well worth the money. I have a built-in GPS in our other car, and each map update for it is $135.

  16. Chinese language book?

    in Stateside

    Posted

    Does anyone know if the George R R Martin Game of Thrones series has been published in a Chinese version? ChunMei's been watching the HBO version on DVD with Chinese sub-titles and is fascinated. I'd like to be able to get a copy of at least the first book for her.

  21. Church Wedding

    in Stateside

    Posted

    ChunMei and I were married in a Presbyterian church in Littleton, Colorado with no problems whatsoever. I contacted them about three weeks in advance, the checked their schedule, and we were married by an associate pastor at 2:30 PM on a Saturday afternoon, with about 20 people in attendance.

     

    Quick, easy, and inexpensive.

  24. Does your wife overstuff luggage to the point of bursting?

    in Communications, Planes, Shipping & Money

    Posted

    Heard from ChunMei this morning. She emailed me from an internet café because it will take another 2-3 days before she has live wife in her parent's place.

     

    This trip she was thrilled to learn that she didn't need to pick up her luggage at LAX and haul it between terminals and re-check it. She was able to check it through all the way from Denver to Beijing. Unfortunately, when she checked it in Beijing for her flight to Nanning they sent it to Hong Kong! Took an extra day to get it back to Nanning.

     

    Murphy in action, I guess.

  25. Does your wife overstuff luggage to the point of bursting?

    in Communications, Planes, Shipping & Money

    Posted

    ChunMei left for China Sunday for 10 weeks. she took two suitcase, and weighted them very carefully before we went to the airport. Our bathroom scale showed them at 50 pounds each. At the airline check in one of them came at 51 pounds, but US Airways cut us some slack and didn't charge for the extra pound. But for the 40 minutes we sat together before she went through Security she was worrying about what she could take out to bring it down a pound when she got to Beijing before she boarded her Nanning flight. :rotfl:

     

    Haven't heard from her yet, so I don't know what that worked out.

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