Friday, February 29, 2008
Last Shower, Last Laundry, Last Post
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Hooray for "Happy Man"!
Oh Joy!! "Happy Man"--as we call it, for the owner is such a nice smiley man--is open again! We had lunch there today: pork with garlic shoots, mushu pork (pork, wood-ear mushrooms, cucumber, scrambled egg), homestyle tofu (tofu with carrots and green peppers), and baby bok choy with mushrooms (not the wimpy mushrooms from home--these are meaty). We're back in business with yummy food.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Musings On The 200th Day
Friday, February 8, 2008
Shanghai
Long before we started on our
A snowy, foggy view from our window on the 12th floor of the Hengshan/Picardie Hotel.
We have lived so cheaply in Hohhot that we saved enough money aside to really stay in style—we planned on 7 days in Shanghai, with not much to do other than enjoy a high-style vacation that we will undoubtedly never be able to duplicate again in our lives—and thanks to the wise advice of Zach and Pan Yu, we found ourselves in the quiet neighborhoods of the French Concession rather than in the middle of the bustle of the Bund.
Zach met us at the airport when we arrived late at night and successfully got us to our hotel where we gratefully dropped off to sleep in our super cushy bed. (The only hitch in arriving in Shanghai was that that little red carry-on bag of Grace’s—remember, the one that went AWOL in the Xi’an airport?—got left on the bus we took from the airport. It was weird to stand there on the street at midnight, watching the bus drive off with Grace’s stuffed animals. We did get it back, thanks to Zach and Pan Yu’s kind efforts to track it down. We now obsessively count bags and bodies every time we move from place to place—ticket counter, waiting area, plane, bus, taxi, whatever.)
Roughing it in bed: Grace, Samuel, and Dave. The king-size bed was a pillowtop with an additional feather bed on top of the mattress. It sure beat the bean pillows we've been sleeping on for the past 6 months.
One morning, so completely disgusted with the shaggy dog stage my hair has permanently moved into, I went to a hair salon where I innocently expected to be able to make my wishes known, by whatever rudimentary means possible. I mean, everywhere else we went people spoke to us in English before we could even whip out our few stock phrases. Why not in the hair salon too, where the name (2 Girls) and the sign on the door listing services and prices were in English? Ah, sweet innocence. Once in the seat (thereby committed to going the whole way) I soon realized that I was going to have to wing it. It turned out there was only one stylist on duty so while I waited I was treated to a 10-minute hair washing session, tea, and a 20-minute back massage. When the stylist finally was ready, we looked at a picture out of a magazine together, mimed how much I wanted cut, and he went to work. One hour later, I had as passable a hair cut as I could hope for having not had any of the obligatory chit chat about what I wanted, the weather, so and so’s unbearable fashion sense, the movies, or the latest scandal in People magazine. Fully expecting to pay an arm and a leg (20-minute massage?? One-hour haircut? French Concession in
Rather than give a boring blow by blow of our week, here are some pictures that will give you a sense of our vacation, of Shanghai, and of how little we really did capture on film—the weather was so bad we feared taking the camera out and often we just did the same things every day: stroll around, drink coffee, eat a yummy dinner either alone (twice take out from Papa John’s pizza) or with Zach and Pan Yu (Indian, hot pot, Zhuang food), read books, or laze around our cozy hotel room.
We were among the few crazy people who went to the Shanghai Zoo when it was snowing. Most animals were in hiding, but we did see the pandas (sleeping).
A view of the Bund across the Huangpu river from the Pudong. The Bund is the stretch of old European buildings, most dating from the early 20th century.
Looking the other way across the river towards the super modernistic buildings of the Pudong. You can't even see the top of the skyscrapers for all the fog. It was pouring rain on this day.
While I got my hair cut, Dave and the kids hung out at the neighborhood Starbucks. They sipped hot chocolate (it was another cold rainy day) and read their books. We never imagined, way back when we were still doing night duty with babies, that there would come a day when we could hang out in coffee shops again. This is Samuel starting out on Harry Potter 3--we bought it the day before and it was finished 4 days later.
It is a really good thing we didn't find this place on the first day. As it was, we took some jambon-gruyere sandwiches (fancy name for ham and cheese on a baguette) and four big slices of rhubarb tart to the airport with us for our dinner.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Spring Festival with Bonnie and Clyde
I know it's dark and fuzzy, but I just had to have Dave take a picture so you could get an idea of the lanterns and the paper banners on either side of the door as well as along the top. This is the front door of the IEC, where we had dinner.
The kids and I arrived at Clyde’s room (he and Bonnie live on the ground floor of the
Clyde and Bonnie frying spring rolls.
Dave and Clyde's dad--Dave is stuffing slices of lotus root with jiaozi stuffing, ground pork and spices. Lao Song then fried the lotus root. Very tasty and salty.
You can tell by these pictures that the meal wasn't cooked in a traditional kitchen. These are two rooms that serve as a general cooking and laundry area to the students who live in the IEC building. When my washing machine broke, this is where I came to do my laundry. It is amazing that so much food could be prepared over just a couple of hotplates. Once the cooking was finished--and most of it was done by Clyde's dad, Clyde, and Bonnie--everyone gathered in a small dorm room to eat.
Lao Song (left), the concierge, Mrs. Song (right). In front of them from left to right: tomatoes with sugar sprinkled on top, chicken feet, nibbly dish--I don't know what, spring rolls, fried fat, noodles with wood-ear mushrooms and shredded cucumbers.
Me and Grace, Rich on the right. In front of us: meat balls, barbequed mutton, crunchy pink, white, and yellow things, a whole chicken.
Clyde explained to us that round foods represent family, the lotus root in a circular shape represents coins for prosperity. Not shown in the pictures were two different fish plates, one of fried mackerel pieces, the other a whole piece of freshwater fish. Fish represents abundance. I am sure that the other plates had meanings but I did not find them out. Clyde did say that pretty much everything they served is what his family eats every year for New Year's. Very much like our Thanksgiving dinner--you gotta have the same things every year. We ate a lot and there was much toasting going around, with Clyde translating back and forth.
After we ate, we went out front to let the kids set off some fireworks. Dave bought a behemoth (or so we thought at the time) box of fireworks that when set off shot balls of fire straight up in the air, where they burst open like the fireworks we only get to see set off by the city at home. Wonderful showers of color. The kids held firecracker whips and little torch things. I am not a fireworks fan, but with Clyde there supervising everything I figured we were safe.
Happy kids and their fire sticks. It was freezing outside, by the way. Not at all like the fourth of July in more ways than one.
Frozen to the core, we came back in where the kids promptly ran off to play video games on Clyde's computer (oh, I thought, this is how you get kids to stay up to midnight without complaining...) and I went into another room to help stuff jiaozi. I am so in love with the process of making jiaozi! Eating it is pretty nice, too.
Me, the concierge's wife, Mrs. Song, Bonnie. Apparently I passed the test and they were all pleased with my jiaozi stuffing technique. Phew!
Midnight came faster than I expected, thankfully, since I am normally not much of a night owl. We ran outside first to watch the fireworks go off. I can't even figure out how to find the words to most clearly describe what it felt like. It was like being in a Fourth of July fireworks show. Everywhere around us fireballs shot up into the sky to burst out in huge sprays of color. What I had originally thought was a huge box of fireworks (our contribution) became totally dwarfed in size by the gigantic boxes of fireworks set out in the parking lot in front of the IEC. Balls of fire shot straight up, burst into color, and rained back down just in front of us. All around us you could smell the sulfur and literally feel the booming of the firecrackers strung out on the pavement looking like ammunition belts. As an inveterate scrooge when it comes to fireworks, I have to admit it felt like Christmas morning when the real Scrooge realized he still had time to change the course of events in his life--I just couldn't stop smiling and laughing and saying "Wow!" It was really incredibly marvelous. The kids ran around (safely out of the way of the fireworks) howling like wolves and giggling, just plain delirious from the late hour and the raucous sense of controlled anarchy around us. The thought that all of China was doing exactly the same thing just really made the whole event even more incredible and immense.
We returned from this excitement to find jiaozi on the table. We happily gobbled it up, toasted the New Year and our friends, then scooted off for home, tired and serenaded by a constant chorus of booms, pops, and whistles.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Terracotta Warriors, Gift Shops, and Good Company
Food vendors in the Muslim quarter, gift shops in the background
Another food vendor in the Muslim quarter
With this great enthusiasm filling us to bursting, we naively signed on for a tour of the Terracotta Warriors, the Emperor’s Tomb, and the Banpo Neolithic Village. Our only other experience with a tour of this sort was in
The park grounds around the site of the Terracotta Warriors.
Warriors and horses--the site is not completely excavated because once the statues are exposed they begin to lose their paint. They originally held wooden staffs or carried bows, and there were carriages pulled by the horses (you can see a horse over to the left and a blank spot behind it where the carriage stood).
Robert and Ghislaine
Every one of the 8,000 soldiers has a unique face--no two faces look alike, almost as though each soldier was modeled on a real person. I love the expression on this guy's face.
Freezing on the grounds of the Terracotta Warriors.
Saying good-bye to Robert and Ghislaine in the square in front of the Bell Tower (and Starbucks). Grace performs an post-lunch/pre-hot chocolate dance in front.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Non-Traveling, Traveling, and Day One in Xi'an
We almost didn’t make it out of
Once at the airport we stood for about a half an hour in front of the reader board that lists flights and the counters at which you can check in. Two screens would come up in succession, each pasted with red “canceled” or “delayed” signs—an entire day’s worth of flights marked in red. On the third screen we could see our flight number but no counter listed. We waited and waited. And then inspiration struck Dave: we went and stood in line at a counter we thought likely to deal with our airline. Putting into use the lessons learned way back in Beijing in late July, Dave worked his way to the front of the line and, once he learned that we could check in, he threw our bags onto the conveyor belt before the tour lady next to us could start feeding her collection of 20-odd bags through. It worked! Our two bags checked, we marched through security (we could keep our shoes on and bottles greater than 3 ounces, but Grace had to give up her metal magnet balls) and found the gate marked on our boarding passes. We had been told that the flight was delayed a bit but that it had taken off from
Around 10:30 p.m. we saw a China Eastern plane come in (our airline) and head for one gate down from us. Hmm, interesting. And why, we wondered, did the gate we were sitting at list flight MU235T but flight MU2356 (ours) was nowhere to be seen? On a whim (honestly, I think Dave is starting to develop some kind of sixth sense when it comes to the vagaries, inconsistencies, and downright lack of knowledge involved in travel in China) Dave walked down to the other gate to look into things. Pretty soon Dave came jogging back from that gate—it was indeed our gate (although nowhere could we find notice of the gate change), a fact he found out from fellow passengers. We hauled up our stuff and by 11:00 we were on our way to
We woke up at 8:00 Tuesday morning and upon opening up the curtains finally got our first view of
To the left: the Drum Tower and McDonald's
To the right: the Bell Tower, a shopping mall, and another McDonald's and Starbucks
We're in front of the Drum Tower, just after lunch. Although temperatures were warmer in Xi'an than Hohhot, it seemed bitterly cold because of the wetter climate.
Dave walking up the steps to the city walls.
Looking onto the outside of the walls--you can see the moat on the right and the guard towers around every 100 meters on the wall on the left.
All along the part of the wall we were walking on, workers pieced together these huge lanterns in preparation for Spring Festival. According to Howard, the entire wall will be lit up with lanterns for the New Year's and city folk will be able to stroll amongst them.
Howard and the kids taking a break from the snowfight to pose along the battlements.
Snowfight in action
Samuel posing with a cannon and cannonballs.