Still here

It's safe to say we've been complacent with updates on here recently, however it is complacency with a reason.

For about the last month, since my rather difficult attempt to sit the EU concours we have had guests. First Caroline's parents and then Jo and Neil Clough have been to see us.

It's brilliant when people come to visit and both Caroline and I are lucky that we can take time off, or at least work quite flexibly in order to do lots of visits and trips. For both sets of visitors we have spent just under a week in Beijing visiting the Forbidden City, Tian'anmen Square, the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven, Yonghegong Lama Temple and other sites including just generally trying to give an impression of how we live on a day-to-day basis.

As an aside from Greg's recent email I realise that I didn't finish the tale of the concours sufficiently. As I've likely explained to you in the past (assuming we know each other) the concours is the test by which the EU Institutions hire their workers. Both Caroline and I passed a concours for contract workers (CAST 27) in 2006 and it was this success that got Caroline her current job and our life in China. The most recent test is for permanent officials and is therefore both popular and quite rare. In fact I've read at the EPSO Website, which administers the process that more than 30000 people sat the recent exam. So I was never exactly confident of passing, but did want to at least sit the test. So anyway after a number of complicated efforts I was able to get a rearranged test date. It did seem to go reasonably well, although I would say that wouldn't I…
Anyway, according to that aforementioned Website, the results of the test will be posted in mid-June. I've checked today and there's nothing there yet, but you can be sure I'll post the results as soon as I get them.

So as we've been enjoying our guests and visiting Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xi'an, Suzhou and others there hasn't been much time for anything else other than work. Emails and blogs have fallen by the wayside. And even sleep has become a relatively rare commodity.

I'm now at hongqiao airport in Shanghai, waiting for a flight back to Beijing and Caroline is in Laos for a few days with Sunnia. So apart from the football, which I am enjoying despite the paucity of most games, the next few dad will be relatively quiet and back in the normal routine. So I'm going to take the opportunity to upload photographs and write a couple of posts on here about our travels - there's always stories to relate.

Stick with it and you'll get some impressions of a few more cities we have visited.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone