This past weekend was a relaxing one with dinner at a friend's on Saturday and then taking most of Sunday off to enjoy each other's company. We packed a picnic lunch (including a freshly baked loaf of lemon-rosemary bread from Weaver St) and ate at the NC Botanical Gardens, which currently has an impressive collection of blooms. Then, in order to avoid the heat a little, we decided to catch a movie at Chelsea. The cinema wasn't packed, but of the people who were there, we were one of 4 or 5 who were younger than 60 years old. We felt like we had accidentally stumbled across the afternoon movie activity at a retirement home! Who knows if it was because it as a Sunday matinee, or because it was Father's Day and all the wives pitied their hubbies who weren't celebrating with their children for some reason or another and took them to the movies -- it was plan odd. Anyway, "Paris, je t'aime" was a fun collection of 20 short films on the lives of people in and around Paris. Some we really appreciated, a few were odd, and most of them were thoughtful.

We have decided to continue our lease at the condo complex we are living in for the next 2 years (and managed to cut a good deal for it due to the longer lease period). Our place is a great location and the neighbors are friendly. We had our immediate neighbors, another international couple, Tim (an Australian) & Timomi (a Japanese) over for an Indian dinner last week. It was fun to finally get to chat with them for longer than our usual sidewalk greetings. We also got to try a few new recipes -- the Chicken Tikka Marsala and the Cucumber Raita turned out particularly well (if we do not say so ourselves).

As a result of our decision to stay on here, Shuwen has been doing quite a bit of gardening lately, and we now have a few new plants and a small veggie garden plot (~ 3ft x 4ft, but expandable) around the back of the house in addition to the herbs and tomato plants up front. It will take a while for things to grow in, but hopefully in about two months we will have veggies to harvest! So far the edible plants include: Straightneck & crookneck squashes, Zucchini, Okra, Black Beauty Eggplant, Cherry tomatoes, Heirloom (we think) tomatoes, Habanero Pepper, Nasturtium, Fennel, Basil, Parsley, Peppermint. We also have some brightly colored Celosia's in the front of the house.

Marc has been busy with church responsibilities lately as the new chair of a very large committee that does outreach and service work in the community. The Board of Outreach and Service (BOS) does an amazing amount of work including (among others): working towards economic justice, coordinating volunteers to the local food bank and shelters, prison ministry, and helping newly arrived refugees. Recently, our church adopted a Karen Burmese family who are gradually settling into life in the US and Carrboro/Chapel Hill. The couple is pretty young ( mid-20s) and they have two young children with them (~ 3 and 1 year old). They do not speak any English and are taking ESL classes here. It must be strange for them to be coming from a refugee camp to suddenly having rooms of their own, home appliances like a microwave, an oven, vacuum cleaner, dish washer, etc, and being surrounded by big American people speaking an incomprehensible language. Fortunately, the neighborhood they are living at has a handful of Burmese who have been around for a bit and so can help them. Many member of our church have really been great pitching in to help by donating furniture and home supplies, helping with groceries, and providing rides to the couple's English classes.

Talking about immigration, we are making progress with the PR status application. We are now scheduled for an initial interview with the authorities, so we will have to make another trip to Charlotte in a few weeks. Also, Shuwen has received her travel authorization approval so now she is free to travel outside of the US (at least until mid-May 2008, so hopefully everything else will be approved by then too). It hasn't been as painful of a process as we thought it might be, other than the annoyance of having to constantly gather up and organize our documents, make copies, and the constant fear that we forgot something important that will mess up our whole application.