Month: January 2011

Around Town: To the Mountain

Published by Sula H.

It’s our favorite retreat: the mountain about 30 km from our town. It’s not really anything special, not even the place the majority of Chinese around us would choose for a hike – they prefer the neighboring highest peak in the area that has stairs leading all the way up to the top. But when it comes to hiking, we like the “non-stairy” business, the natural trails. While everyone in this area knows about the neighbor peak, hardly anyone knows about the gorge that leads just past said peak between the mountains. We just found this place early in spring last year, but it was our first time to go there since the beginning of winter. And with all the undergrowth gone, we found a lot of new trails that we’ll definitely explore in the future.

Food Corner: New Meal Schedule

Published by Sula H.

I know we are pretty spoiled, getting our meals, usually three times a day, served buffet style. However, during the winter break, things change around here. Now we only get served two meals a day, brunch at 10 am, dinner at 5 pm. Brunch offers a rather typical selection of American breakfast items (they call it Western, though; but for me as a European, it’s not anything we would serve for a breakfast, lol): scrambled eggs, fried eggs, boiled eggs, bacon, sausages, fried potatoes, pancakes, french toast, blueberry omelet, and always a Chinese style porridge. On top of that we have toast, oatmeal, some sort of cereals, honey, yogurt, and jam. Did I ever mention I miss cheese? Well, anyways, this is nothing like the typical Chinese breakfast, but I hope to be able to show you more of that in the future! For now, I’m just saying: Bon Apetit!

Inspire Me: Journaling

Published by Sula H.

It may only be a small part of our scrapbook pages, but nonetheless it may make or break our layouts: the journaling. A lot of us really struggle when it comes to journaling, because we want to make our little sentiments interesting and meaningful. Journaling, however, doesn’t have to be such a painful part of our scrap page designs, as there are lots of tools and inspiration out on the web. One such tool I came across just recently is the website called reverb10.com. They offer prompts to boost our journaling, and some of these prompts actually translate into a scrapbook page quite well. Recent prompts have been about your most memorable gift describing a defining moment in your life your most ordinary joyful moment in the last year etc. I’m determined to use these prompts in some of my future layouts, and maybe you will, too …?

Places to Go: Summer Palace

Published by Sula H.

One of the finest sights in Beijing without doubt is the Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), to the north-west of the city. Its extensive grounds and buildings served as a summer residence for the royal family especially during the reign and lifetime of Empress Dowager Cixi, although it had been a royal garden long before that. The palace consists of four major areas: court reception, residences, temples and extensive gardens. Three-quarters of the park are covered by water – the Kunming Lake. Quite special for the Summer Palace is its Long Corridor (Changlang) which runs for about 728m alongside the shore of the Kunming Lake and is richly decorated with paintings of mythical scenes. Throughout the centuries, the Summer Palace has faced several periods of destruction and restoration, and even now it is constantly under construction to preserve the rich cultural and historical relics that can be found here.

Behind the Scenes: Typewriter Fonts

Published by Sula H.

It’s about time that I’d take you to the world of fonts. For a long time, I’ve been intrigued by fonts, collecting them on my computer (and yes, I’m aware that people say they slow things down). Still, I can’t help myself – I do love fonts, and it’s great how you can put them to use in digital scrapbooking. So, today I want to talk about typewriter fonts. Tons of different typewriter fonts are out there – a lot of them for free. You can use clean types, but I especially love the ones that look old, worn, ragged. In general, typewriter fonts will give your page a kind of vintage look. They also work great when you combine them with handwriting fonts. On top of that they make great word strips, even work as titles. Here’s just a quick glance at some of my pages I did recently where I used typewriter fonts (simply click on the image to enlarge): Now that you’ve seen all this inspiration, of course you want to know, …

Winter Break

Published by Sula H.

It’s official now: as of today the school’s winter break has started. Most students have left the campus and it has become rather quiet around here. Until the middle of February, when students start to return, nothing much will go on in this part of town. Most of my colleagues have left as well, mainly seeking refuge in the warmer regions such as Thailand & other parts of South East Asia. For the few of us who decided to stick around, it will be very quiet in the next couple of weeks.