Feb 22/23, 2010 - crossing the international dateline
It's after noon and still no sun! We boarded the plane at 2am Mon Feb 22 in Vancouver, after a really nice evening with my brother Dave and Jim's cousin Eugene, and we've been chasing the night at pretty close to 1000 km/hour around the planet for over 10 hours since. Just another three hours to go, to Hong Kong. There's a five hour stopover there before taking a one hour flight to Xiamen, arriving the afternoon of the 23rd.
It was a wild few days before we left, so we've been able to doze on and off, trading one cramped position for another. I'm trying to think back on when we did what this past week...
I did the last of the Interfaith Dialogue sessions on Valentine's Day, a week ago Sunday. We were looking at Mermaid Wharf's fourth floor condo, 491 sq feet. Our goal has been to leave funds for China and semi-retirement, but at the same time we needed something nice to rent to vacationers each year while we're away.
Around mid-January, we'd made an offer on a 12th floor Bickerton Ct condo downtown and had promptly gotten spoiled by the city view on the north side of the building, the huge common areas, Victoria's largest park just outside the door, the easy walk anywhere - east to the grocery store, north to the Inner Harbour and downtown, south to the long stretch of walkable ocean, east to Cook St Village... all within 10 minutes. And the size... Ever since we started looking at "nice"condos, anything over 700 sq ft has gone from minuscule in my mind to relatively massive. The one we made the offer on was over 700 sq ft.
But the offer fell through.
Since then, after a month of looking, nothing else had come close, so last Tuesday we asked our realtor to please check to see if anything else in Bickerton Court was available. Turned out, the condo across the hall was about to go on the market in 2 days. Renovated interior, better layout, better view - south facing - ocean and mountain view. On Wednesday we saw it and on Thursday our offer was accepted. We pored over the strata papers. All good. On Sunday we were leaving for Vancouver to catch our flight, so we booked a mover for the 2nd of April and ordered furniture that would be delivered at that date so we wouldn't have to sleep on an air mattress. Everything went perfectly, the choice, the delivery date, even the sale price.
This means that Coral and Ovidio will get their hoped for moving date of school's Spring Break, and most of our furniture. The Baha'i community will get a wonderful family with 4 kids in school, and our house gets good gardeners to take care of the fruit trees, kiwi plants and grapevines!
Meanwhile, we have to see what Xiamen is like... because that's the goal. I started an online TESOL course, and we've done research on living costs, medical, visas, crunching numbers. It looks doable. The only catch was that in Hong Kong last year at this time, I had a sore throat, bloody nose and lost voice from the pollution. Worse reaction than anyone else. It all disappeared immediately upon return. We've heard that Xiamen is far smaller, the size of Vancouver, and clean.
