Kim Kim's Far East Adventures: January 2013

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

painting update...

This is a recent painting I did for my dad. He likes birds. I call this painting, Be brave Little Bird Take flight.

LOL! I am TOTALLY joking. I just made that up. I don't name my paintings. I was laughing at myself trying to come up with a title for the painting. Sometimes I like to be funny ;o)

And currently I am working on a bird with bamboo

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Just Cats....

I am kind of back tracking because of I have been lax on posting. But I wanted to write about one of my adventures in Japan.

Japan is a very awesome country. I loved the culture there. People are SUPER polite. Definitely the most polite and respectful group of people I have met. They have wonderful food. Their country is extremely clean and things run like a well oiled machine. Or though it seemed from my short trip their.

But just like any country they have their quirks and one is the Cat Cafes. You may be asking yourself, what is a cat cafe? Well, it is a place where you pay to be around cats. You can get a coffee or a soda and you just sit and pet the cats. I had heard about these places before so I just had to go. I am an animal lover, but I have to say that many cats in one place was a bit much, especially since I had to pay to go and hang out with them. In the U.S. you can volunteer at the Humane Society or your local animal shelter and hang out with the animals for free. This was not something the boys were keen on, no surprise there. And they are all allergic to cats. So I braved the cat cafe on my own. ☺

I will show you with pics what a cat cafe looks like.

Here is where you check in..as you can see cats are waiting to greet you. How much of my money did I pay to play with cats you ask....I think it was like 7.00USD for an hour.

I honestly thought I would go and be the only person there...but I was wrong...lots of people pay to play with cats.

5 cats and a coke

grumpy cat

because the cats get attention all day, they are not really excited to hang out with you. so to entice them you can pay an extra fee and buy some little chicken pieces, which I did....I mean go big or go home right? ☺ and then the cats will gladly come and hang out with you.

people were literally just there hanging out like it was starbucks, but with cats, but at this starbucks you have to pay to enter, like a night club before you even buy your drink

this cat hanging out on a girls back

a face only a mother could love

hanging out under a girl's skirt

there is a place to play video games, while being surrounded by cats

another cat

an orange cat

a cat with flipped ears...I have always one of these cats...i try to flip my cats ears back but they never stay for long

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

2012 Year end Review

I hope everyone had a Very Happy Christmas and I hope your New Year is off to a great start!

2012 was our first full year in China and things are still going great.

We want to start out by first thanking the Lord for all of our blessings. We can never thank and Praise Him enough for all He has done for us. We know that all that we have and all that we have been able to see and experience this year comes from Him. We have bone places and experienced things we never thought we would experience. He has kept us safe when we travel and kept us both free of illness as well. So we thank God for the blessing and mercies He gives us each and every day.

We were able to travel to many places this year. We went to Boracay, LiJiang, the United States, Japan, Singapore and Yellow Mountain. Each place was amazing in it's own unique way. We are loving being able to see the world and cannot wait to see what 2013 has to bring.

Our friends Brian and Vu traveled over from the U.S. in October to meet us in Japan. That was a real treat. Being able to see friends on this side of the world is really awesome.

We also got to see our friend Dave, who was over on business. So we saw three of our friends from the U.S. in Asia this year.

Michael has been super busy with work. He has traveled a lot for work this year. He has been all over China and also to Europe. He is loving his job though and the guys who are on his team. They are all real gems. I love them as well and I don't even get to see them on a daily basis. Only when we get to go out to fun dinners with them. They are all super sweet and funny. They always make me laugh.

This was our most recent dinner out with the guys.

I am keeping busy with my painting class, language class, mahjong, acupuncture, working from time to time, spending time with friends and other miscellaneous things. ☺ I keep surprisingly busy. I feel blessed to be able to have time to just enjoy each day to the fullest. I know it is a real gift having free time. So I try and make the most of it because I know it will come to an end one day!

I will leave you with some pics from our Christmas in Singapore.

Getting room service the first night into the hotel. Because our train to get to Shanghai was delayed 2 hours which would have made us miss our flight, so we had to call our driver back who had just left us at the train station ask him to drive us 4 hours to Shanghai to try and catch plane so we would not miss flight. Then our flight ended up being delayed four hours, so we got to hotel at almost midnight with no dinner. It was a much longer crazy travel day than expected, so we treated ourselves to room service. It was my first time getting room service and it was awesome. Michael said I picked the right place to have room service for the first time because it was 5 star all the way. Super Yummy!

Orchard Street....biggest shopping street in Singapore. We did not realize how busy it was. So many people we could barely walk but it was beautifully decorated.