Busy weekend ahead

Autumn image from webdesignledger.com

We will have company over the weekend.

International company.

This isn’t the first time we’ve hosted people from another country, and it isn’t the first time we’ve hosted two people at the same time.   This weekend, we’ll have two guys from China staying with us.

They’re Eisenhower Fellows, visiting the US for a 4-5 week stay and meeting people, making professional connections and seeing how Americans live.  These two particular guys work for the Chinese government, and because they’d requested to spend some time “in the country,” they’ll stay with us over the weekend, between their official meetings in New York/Washington, DC on Friday and in DC/Boston on Tuesday.

The CEO was the US Eisenhower Fellow for Agriculture in 2007; he did his six-week study in Australia and New Zealand, on international beef markets.  I was able to join him for three weeks – about five days at the tag end of his time in Australia, when we visited a sheep and cattle station in New South Wales and spent a few days in Sydney.  We were actually able to have dinner with some relatives-by-marriage in Sydney, and enjoyed that very much.  Kind of a complicated relationship: The CEO’s sister E is married to his college roommate K.  All of K’s grandparents were born in China, so he’s 100% ethnic Chinese, and he’s got family strung from New Jersey to San Francisco and other places around the world, including an aunt in Sydney.  She herself was born in the US, and then met a Thai-born Chinese guy at the University of Maryland, married him, and moved to Australia.  (It was amusing to meet K’s cousin, who looks strikingly like him, and hear this Chinese guy speaking with an Australian accent!  It’s probably just as odd to our Chinese visitors to see someone who looks like home, but talks like an American…)

I really enjoyed our trip to New Zealand, and I’d love to go back.  In fact, if we ever decided to live somewhere other than the US, I’d be pushing for Wellington, or somewhere near it.  The CEO had done his master’s degree at Massey University in New Zealand, and it was nice to be able to see where he’d spent those two years in Palmerston North.  New Zealand is very beautiful, with amazing geography, and I loved every minute there.  We’ve got loads of photos somewhere…

Since returning from The CEO’s Fellowship, we’ve hosted several international Fellows.  First, a lovely couple from Nigeria, a doctor and her husband, who owns a pharmaceutical company – Olanike and Biodun.  Then Somkiat from Thailand who is a political adviser in an independent think tank, and Dong Qing, who teaches at a high-level educational facility in China.  And Erik, from Brazil, who is CFO of a large company that provides electricity to the nation.  (Erik had never eaten chicken gravy until we took him to The Homeplace.  He loved it.  Called it “sauce”- which, I suppose, it technically is.)

Erik-from-Brazil took this photo of our family at Mabry Mill a couple of years ago.

I do like having people visit; I just wish we could pick a different weekend.  With one son’s birthday on the 5th and one on the 13th, we usually try to have a family birthday party for the two of them on the weekend in between.  Eisenhower Fellowships complicates that.  US Fellows can pick the time of year that suits them to make their trips (The CEO left for Australia in early July, and I joined him on the 26th, and we were home by the second week of August), but Fellows visiting the US are here during specified times of the year, October or April, so that they can meet each other. 

And this weekend, we’ll have Honghua, who is a university think tank professor of Chinese-American studies economic relations, and “Bill,” who runs the Chinese equivalent of the Social Security Administration investment fund, staying with us.  We’ll let them putter around on the farm, see some cows, maybe ride on the tractor.  We’ll probably take them for a meal at The Homeplace restaurant, which specializes in Southern food served homestyle: sweet iced tea, fried chicken, country ham, mashed potatoes and fried apples and green beans and biscuits, yum.  And then The CEO is planning to take them to Monticello on the way to catch their flights at Dulles on Monday.  So I’ll be busy, probably with no time to post reviews or Scent Diary until next Monday night or Tuesday, but look for something then.

Have a great weekend!