The Chinese kids have made it home safely. The Banff bears didn’t get ’em. Too skinny, I guess. Probably not considered worth the trouble compared to northern Europeans. Germans are the full-meal deal (flavour packed and chock full o’chocolate!) and the favoured menu items for the bears so the kids were fine.

(The running German bear joke is for my one European reader, Corinna.)

Travel advice: when in Banff, go where the German tour bus has just been – the animals are full and much safer to be near.

We get follow up e-mails from the kids for a while after their visit to Canada. Usually one or two will write for about a year and then their lives move on. But, now and then, one or two ‘pop up’ again on the e-mail and we find out what is happening in their lives. It’s fun, actually.

Well, not always. Christine is a nice kid. Graduated and is now an accountant. Works like a machine for ridiculous hours in terrible conditions. And she is not really ‘fit’ enough for that. She writes: “Guess where I am? I am in Mongolia now, a totally new country for me. I am doing audit for a Mongolian company. Here is super super cold, minus thirty something. I got a cold here…life here is quite difficult, different languages, different cultures and the weather is driving me crazy…I have a very special new year here, that is staying in the apartment and eating cup noodles”.

Some just slip into ‘mainstream Hong Kong/China life’, others embark on something more adventurous and some even ‘break out’ and become free radicals of a sort maybe continuing their travels or changing career paths. Trust me: changing career paths is ‘breaking out’ in Hong Kong culture. Jin joined Greenpeace! Dong went from being shy and practically invisible to a confident, outgoing young man.

Ya just never know with kids, do ya?

It’s been a funny summer so far. Sunshine was late in coming. Temperatures nowhere near normal. Everything’s been a little ‘off’. We had a weird summer, weather wise. But, by comparison to the rest of the world, we had the best. Much of the NA continent was assaulted by 100F degree temperatures for long periods of time and all sorts of things were going on around the world including Tsunamis, Hurricanes, radiation poisoning and earthquakes – just to name a few of the headliners.

We got a bit less sunshine. Wahh!

And things got worse in a lot of places. I doubt that Haiti is much better than it was and the horn of Africa is being ravaged again. I’d hate to be an Iraqi. Tough place, this Gaia-ball.

We have nothing to complain about.

Well, there were the wasps! We couldn’t find the nest and so every happy hour had unwanted guests. So, I guess we have had our share of the pain. Woe is us.

But don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine. Resilient is our middle name. We’ll switch to gin and tonics – the wine attracts the little bastards too much. “We will not be driven out of the neighbourhood by those damn wasps!” I believe it was ‘Wheezie’ Jefferson who first said that.

If they can deal with them, so can we.