Organic veggies and inspiring students

Two students from my Applied Global Development and Public Health class organized a trip to an organic farm on Chongming Island this past weekend. What a wonderful day! The girls have created a partnership with a local school (the students at the school are mostly children of migrant workers) where they are delivering organic veggies to the school on a bi-weekly basis to augment the very simple lunch program. These veggies would normally be plowed under because they are considered unfit for market (maybe they're too small, or have minor blemishes). Rather than waste this nutritious and delicious food, the girls came up with the idea of the school partnership; they organized Saturday's trip as a way to fund the transportation of the vegetables to the school, and raised enough money to pay for deliveries for a whole year. How awesome is that? I am so proud of these two and the work they are doing. They have embraced the idea of being a changemaker and are creating waves of positive change.

Echoes of Holland... tulips in Shanghai

This week, our wonderful friends the Turners suggested heading to the Shanghai Tulip Festival after school one day. Off we went, in search of Daning Park in Puxi. We were rewarded with fields upon fields of tulips in artfully designed ribbons of colour and finished off our excursion with noodles and dumplings. What a great evening with fabulous friends.

Shanghai Literary Festival

Every year in Shanghai there is a wonderful literary festival that runs for 2 1/2 weeks. This year, we were away for the first weekend of the festival and missed Amy Tan and some other great authors. This weekend, we enjoyed a talk by Carolyne Larrington about medieval history and Games of Thrones. She is an Oxford professor who just published a book about this very subject called Winter is Coming (of course we bought a copy and had her sign it for us). Afterwards, we treated ourselves to a delicious lunch at M on the Bund and enjoyed 3 courses of fabulous food and a walk along the Bund and up Nanjing Road. Yes, we love this city.

Weekend in Hong Kong: Fabulous PD and lots of fun

Brian and I have been to Hong Kong before, but not together. This seems to be a popular destination for PD conferences and we've always gone to this vibrant city at different times. Last weekend we were lucky to go to a conference together and, not only was the PD amazing but we also had a fabulous time exploring this busy, busy city. We hiked up to the Tian Tan Buddha and enjoyed the lush greenery of Lantau, and also immersed ourselves in the uber urban streets of Mong Kok. We ate our fill of dim sum and enjoyed some fun night life, too. What a great weekend!

Tea from Sri Lanka to celebrate Hannah's travels

To our surprise and delight, this package arrived a few weeks ago: delicious tea from Sri Lanka! Thanks to Hannah, we are sipping the most lovely Ceylon yumminess and

toasting her adventurous spirit.