Saturday, June 12, 2010

Beijing air quality

Just in case you don't know, there's a twitter feed from the US Embassy's pollution monitoring station that lets you know particulate and Ozone levels. Or you can just look out the window and see how far you can see!

Friday, June 11, 2010

Latest youtube favourites for my girls

Thanks to a Firefox plugin that lets us "cache" the videos, the girls like quite often to look at pre-approved videos on our computer. No Lady Gaga for them even if they like the music!

Anyway, they're current favourites are some of the eurovision numbers form this year and previous ones and also some awesome Billy Joel stuff: Uptown Girl and Tell Her About It.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Be You world

So, my daughters love a kind-of theme park that we went to a couple of weeks ago and my wife is planning to take them again. It's called BeYou world and basically kids can go and be supervised by helpers (while parents read a book and drink coffee) for 20-45 minutes at a time in various "jobs" like Firefighter, Nurse, Surgeon, Police, Photographer, Model, Airline steward, Pilot, Baker, Juice-maker, Soldier, etc.

Each session runs for 4 and a half hours (sessions start at 10am and 3.30pm). Each job gives them "money" that they can use to buy small gifts at the end fo the day. Its cheaper during the week but a session is quite expensive (160 per child, 20 per adult off-peak, 200/80 peak). They have a website and during the week the morning session is for pre-bookings only. Website and the park is Chinese language only, though!