Life in the Slow Lane

There is a place here in Beijing that I (not so) affectionately call The Crazy Market. Imagine four floors of wall to wall shops, one shop selling the same thing that 15 other shops are selling, all displayed with bright colors and lights and each shop having two or three people who call out "Hello! What are you looking for?" "Hello! We give you good price!" "Hello! How many coats you want buy?" "Hello! We have your size shoe!" (This one makes me want to stop and say "Oh, I greatly doubt it.") "Hello! Nice pearls for you!" If you so much as look at an item, it is immediately assumed that you will buy it and so they call out "What is your highest price? We give you good discount." The only exception to this is the very bottom floor that is filled with every imaginable and unimagineable sea creature and various sea creature parts in various stages of life. This serves as a good aroma which frequently makes its way up t...

For all of my visions of germs dancing through the city, I look forward to the two cool times of the day, in the morning and evening, when toddlers and infants and elders and roller blading kids fill the courtyards and sidewalks. Then it is a good time to be pushing a child and to nod at the others and exchange greetings and smiles.

For all of my inability to understand certain aspects of the Chinese culture, I am amazed at their design of buildings and gardens. They do both with amazing innovation and incorporation of beautiful things. Yesterday we went to the Summer Palace where we walked over the bridge of the 17 Hallways to the Temple of Extreme Moisture and Rain. It was only fitting that at this point we were soaked from the knees down and that by the end of our visit most of us would be soaked clear through. I must admit that I enjoyed the rain a bit more than my travel companions (youth does have its advantages) but the absolute best thing about the Summer Palace in the rain were the lotus leaves. The leaf shoots high out of the water and then unfolds to create a large lilly pad that cups slightly. In the rain, the leaf fills up drop by drop until it gets too top heavy and then it leans over, dropping the rain on a leaf beneath it or back into the lake. To watch a large group of them fill and spill at diffe...

Some of you have suggested various positives to the diaperless system, but Friday I observed a most disturbing result of this system. I was out in the cool before a rain storm with my charge in his stroller and many others were out with their small children in strollers or wagons or other wheeled toys. Many of the mothers came to coo at my baby and wanted their toddlers to shake hands with him. So they would maneuver their stroller next to his and pull their child's hand out of the slit in their pants to shake hands with my charge. I went through many, many hand wipes that day.

I've seen several variations on the book "Seven Habits of the Highly Successful" and after considerable research, I would like to introduce the abstract for my own version which shall be entitled "Seven Habits of a Tyrant or The Miseducation of a Toddler." I have done all of my research by watching what several Chinese have encouraged my charge to do. 1) Hit faces 2) Hit faces, arms, shoulders, etc with combs, rakes, toys, etc. 3) Stand on desks and counters 4) Chase after money 5) Eat two inch sugar crystals 6) Tear cards 7) Play with cell phones and other easily broken items. Now granted, some of these were taught by a woman who I think is considered foolish by her own countrywomen, but I am curious as to why so many people think it is excellent fun to teach a baby to hit people on the face. Someone suggested that maybe it is the cultural equivalent to those people in our culture who buy the noisiest toy possible for their friends' kids. Whatever it is, th...

I am amazed at the lack of diapered kids running around Beijing. Well, so most of them are not yet running, but the fact that they are too young too run seems to indicate that perhaps they are too young to go diaperless. But alas, that isn't so. My charge's mother was marveling that so many people asked whether my charge was a boy or a girl. Indeed to us, it seems rather obvious that he is a boy, since he wears pants and little button down shirts and has no ribbons in his hair. But then it occured to me that all of the little boys I have seen his age have been either naked, from the waist down, or wearing an odd sort of clothing that consists of everything you might want except for the lack of a seam down the middle. Thus, it is most obvious about the gender of the child. I have been rather curious about the purpose of this item of clothing and rather concerned about the lack of the item of clothing we all consider quite necessary. If anything, in the summer you expect to see b...

Although generally pleased with the condition of our dorm rooms, one aspect greatly disappointed all of us... the mattresses. They have the general level of comfort you would expect of a cement floor with a sheet on top. Due to our spoiled upbringing, we all set about to find ways that we could remedy this problem. Many of us chose to use the comforters and fold them in varying configurations to get the optimal surface area to depth ratio that we could. One of us thought in advance and brought along an inflatable pool float to stick under a sheet. One of us used the bumper pad of the crib. Some gave in and hunted down a mattress topper in the amazing department store. But one of us hunted down a total of ten pillows and carefully arranged them to cover the surface area of the cement block. This was all fine and good until the cleaning staff came to clean. I happened to be in the hall way with my charge when they first opened the door on this room and there was considerable talking amon...

Yesterday we went to the Great Wall of China at Badaling. You can believe all of the pictures you see of the Great Wall. It really is that impressive and amazing. It was a misty morning and so as we climbed (and you really do climb) what was behind us disappeared and an ever lengthening stretch of wall appeared before us. It was a very magical feeling. I took a lot of pictures. But I think it is safe to say that for as many pictures as I took of the wall, an equal number of pictures were taken of me. We caught a person sneaking a picture of us, and we thought that was kind of cute, but then we stopped to rest at one point and we were nearly mobbed by probably ten to fifteen different requests for photos. It was the most bazaar thing. We kept on trying to move forward and there would be another smiling couple of people who would ask us ever so nicely if we could take a picture with them and each person in the group would have to have their own separate picture with us. We would say ...

Near the school where I am staying is a very large department store. I suspect that I might be able to get lost there for a week. I so far have only gotten lost for a few minutes at a time, but each time I go I only go to a small part of the store and then trace my way back, looking out for the cookie crumbs that my charge has dropped as he nibbles happily. The very top floor is a grocery, and it is unlike any grocery store I have ever seen. On one end are fish tanks with all sorts of things you didn't know existed. In the middle are fruits and veggies and baked goods and then on the other far end are the packaged items like peanut oil, millet (One resaurant we went to offered Mullet Soup, that may be the only tasteful way to have a mullet.), crackers, and Oreos. I was looking for things that might appease my stomach, and while I made a few wise choices, I failed in one purchase. I thought I was buying milk. It looked like it might be milk displayed on the outside. It said "da...

Sometimes, being a member of the less honored carries great advantages. Here are a couple of good quotations from the honored members of our group. "And then I saw the optic nerve and the olfactory nerve and the cerebrum." "I didn't eat the eye." "Yeah, I kind of considered the eye to be a bone." (On an unrelated note, for some reason I can post to my blog but I can't actually view my blog. I hope the formatting isn't getting all messed up and bothering you all.)

You haven't seen a tourist trap until you have been to Silk Street in Beijing. The only store where I was foolish enough to admire a blouse I had to leave dragging two sales women behind me. Each one was clasping one of my arms and pulling me back into the store demanding to know how much I wanted to pay. I'm not exagerating. One of the men I am traveling with has never had experience with street vendors and so always stops to explain why he is saying no. He has five daughters, so I imagine he believes that he is saying "no" a lot more forcefully than he actually is. Anyway, on Silk Street, we couldn't find him after wandering around for half an hour and so went out to find him. Eventually we found him... in the very FIRST store we had passed by. He had been trying to leave for 29 minutes and hadn't been able to yet. We try to keep an eye on him since then. While we are on the subject of tourist traps... beware of kite salesmen in the dark. It is kind of hard ...

I was in China for quite some time before Ｉ　ｒｅａｌｉｚｅｄ　ｔｈａｔ　Ｉcould stop digging。 Let‘s just say that the air is a little thick here。 Maybe one of you can take a picture of blue sky and email it to me so that Iｃａｎ　ｒｅｍｅｍｂｅｒ　ｗｈａｔ　ｉｔ　ｌｏｏｋｓ　ｌｉｋｅ。 Ｍｏｒｅ　ｌａｔｅｒ。

Well folks, tomorrow I start digging the hole in my back yard. According to my calculations, I should arrive in China 50 hours after I begin. I hope that I haven't miscalculated the diameter of the earth. Try checking back in a week or so for updates.

Six kids. Three kittens. One half-wild cat. Two colds. One hole in the floor. Six peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. One potty accident. Eight cups of juice One spilled juice. One broken toy. Six cups of milk. Fifty grapes NOW! One know-it-all. One whiner. One clinger. One Veggie Tales movie. One Rescue Rangers movie. One Little Peoples movie. One very large headache.

And so we begin international packing job number four of the summer. (For those who are counting on their fingers... two bags to Brazil, one bag to Europe, one bag to Cameroon, and now this one to China. For those who are trying to figure out if they missed out on hearing about all of my travels, I actually didn't travel with the bags to Brazil and to Cameroon. If this sounds confusing, maybe it will help to know that I packed those bags as a favor to others.) You would think that I would have this all figured out by now. I could just wake up one morning and think "Today I will pack my things and then I won't have to worry about it until I leave." Alas, tis not so. When I pack other people's bags, packing carries almost the same satisfaction as loading a dishwasher. The goal is to see how much you can fit in without rendering your work useless. In a dishwasher, that means making sure everything will get clean. In a suitcase, that means making sure nothing will get...