My silly girls

Adayla put one of our brown couch pillows on her head and said look a Corde hat! Ha ha! (he is my cowboy brother)
Tally wants to be like a big girl and big girls get their hair fixed. So everyday when I do Adayla's hair, Tally runs to the hair drawer (conveniently in the living room) and grabs a barrett for her hair. She brings it to me and then bows her head so I can see the top and fix her hair. I put it in and she immediately pulls it out. We do this about 4 times and then I tell her this is the last time I am going to put it in. I put it in and she pulls it out and off she goes for the rest of the day satisfied that her hair has been fixed!
Josie was visiting with one of the girls that helps her find work in Shanghai. The girl was asking about her family that she lived with here. She already knew that Tim was a university student and so she asked where I worked. Josie told her that I stayed with the kids. The girl just looked at her and said, "So you are the only that actually has a job?" Ha ha, Josie looked at her and said yes!
When we told Adayla we were going to ride the airplane last week (when we flew up to Qingdao), she got very excited about being able to sleep on the plane and go back to Virginia and go visit all her family in Wyoming and Utah. We had to tell her we were just flying somewhere else in China.
Adayla has discovered her love for macaroni and cheese since we moved here. She didn't really prefer to eat in the states, but I think she is so happy that it is not rice that she gobbles is right up. Anyways we have a Barney dvd that sings a song about mac and cheese, so now whenever she asks me for some she says, "can I have some macaroni, macaroni, mac and cheese?" Just like the song says!
Tally continues to learn more and more words. She will say more, more and make a really funny shape with her mouth! She still loves shoes. When she is ready to go out she will get her shoes and she will bring me mine. I think kids are so smart that they notice things like that!
I had another baby appointment this week, happily uneventful. The baby heart rate was 159 and of course I had gained a few pounds (everything here is in Kilograms and I prefer to not know the exact conversion for now!)
We plan on delivering here in Shanghai as long as everything looks as it should. I toured the delivery area yesterday and was quite pleased. The doctor is Chinese, but did most of her studies in the states and speaks fluent English. I have only heard good things about her. The doctor's office is actually on one of the floors in a local Chinese hospital, so the delivery rooms are just around the corner. As for the what ifs.....They have all the equipment necessary to stablilize a baby, if needed, after it is born. Then they would transfer you to a Chinese hospital if they couldn't handle it. If a c-section is needed, they go up a few floors to the Chinese operating room and take care of you there. The only thing the nurse did tell me that is much different from the states is that if you have the baby between 24 and 26 weeks, they don't do much for these babies. In the states, I am not sure what the rate of surival for these babies is, but I know there is a good chance (right...Max?!) So if we can make it past that we are good to go to have a baby here in China.

Qingdao

Last week we took a last minute trip up to Qingdao...a FABULOUS city on the north coast of China. It has many bays, but essentially right on the ocean. You can see quite a few gigantic ships coming in and going out. It was one of the few weekends we had left while the weather was cool to enjoy more sites of China. We looked online, found cheap tickets, and the next day we were on the plane for our 1 hour flight there.

Qingdao will the the city for the sailing events in next year's Olympics. They are quite proud and there are signs all over to inform anyone. We are looking forward to watching it on TV to just see again what a beautiful city it is.

Thankfully, while we were there, the beach bums had all gone home and we could enjoy ourselves without all the extra tourists and people.

We left the house at 6:30 am and so by the time we arrived and took the 1 1/2 taxi to our hotel (with normal traffic it should only be 30-45mins), it was nap time. We checked in at the Super 8 and took one look at our room and knew this wasn't a good idea. It was ideal in the fact that we could put the kids to bed and have somewhere to go, but while they were awake it would have been a nightmare! For the five minutes we were in there, it was up and down the steel stairs for Tally. We are trying to stay out of emergency room in China. Tim went to talk to the front desk and we had to upgrade rooms to get out of that one, but finally it was time for naps. We all rested for a few hours and then we were up and out. We took off walking and found a few interesting parks one with amusement rides. We just walked around until we decided it was time to eat. We looked for a good restaurant, but being quite hungry we settled for a KFC (I am a Chinese food pansy). After dinner, it was dark, but we walked along the beach with the girls anyways. It was so refreshing! The air was crisp and cool and nobody to bother us. We strolled for a couple of hours until it was time for bed.

The next morning we took a cab to another fantastic restaurant, McDonalds! (I think by the time we are finished living in China we will never want to eat there again, but for now it sounds delish.) Chinese food is pretty much the same for breakfast as it is the rest of the day and it just doesn't sound good that early in the morning. The cab driver took us to the most perfect one, it happened to be just down the street for one of the churches we wanted to see. Germans occupied the city from 1897 to 1914 and during this time they built many German style buildings and 2 churches. These buildings totally stand out in China! We then wandered around the town and ended up at most of the places we wanted to visit and then some.

The nicest part about the whole day was that we could just be a family on a vacation. Very few people bothered us for pictures or touched the girls. Our pictures don't capture how beautiful this town really is!

Since this day was Tim's birthday, he found a place that sounded good to eat. A fancier type restaurant that served the best food we've had so far in China! Our meal that filled us to the max....$8.00! Why can't they open up one of those around the corner from our place here in Shanghai. Notice Tally in the picture happily eating her rice. We thought she was done eating (the fried rice hadn't arrived) and in order for us to enjoy the rest of dinner, we gave her a sucker to help babysit! That sucker was immediately put down once the rice arrived....it goes back to that conversation of what Tally will say when the other kids from America are talking about their favorite foods!

Our last day in Qingdao reminded us that we were in China. It was crowded and we could barely take 5 steps without being asked for pictures and people touching the girls. (It was the pier in the background with Tim and Adayla, that solid line is all people!) They built a little pier with a small pagoda. We just had to hold onto the girls, not only was it windy, but China is just not kid proof. It was just so beautiful though that it was worth bumping into all the people. After leaving there, we strolled along the shore, the girls played in the sand, and we found a GIANT jump castle for the girls to play in! It was the biggest one I had ever seen and it only had 2 other kids in it. The girls could jump as long as they liked and they loved it!

We were sad to leave, we just loved the city! The next morning we packed and flew back to Shanghai and are back into our normal routine.

Tim's Vacation to Taiwan

Morgan's job was to add the pics, lucky me. It only takes about an hour to add 10 pics with our internet connection. I was experimenting with the layouts (bad idea) and now I am too tired to try to fix it, so bear with me on this poorly laid out post. My goal for the week is to try to figure out how to add a slideshow.....probably easier than I think. I realized that if we post many pictures, it is a must have. The problem lies with my ability to view the blog, most of the time I have to use a proxy site and so the host site for the slideshow won't appear. Enough, here is Taiwan!

Doesn't Tim look sext on the scooter next to the banana tree!

Ready, set, go!

Dogs can ride on scooters too! (Binx doesn't have my permission to hop on one though....)

Traditional Chinese grave, this holds two people. In mainland China, they bury your body for 3 or 4 years and then creamate you after that.

Scooter man!

Here comes the typhoon!

Tapei 101

Now that we’re already on a trip to Qingdao, I’d better write a bit about my Taiwan trip while it’s still relatively fresh in my mind. Fresh is actually a good word as Taiwan was very refreshing – it was a great time. We travelled all over the island/country/disputed 23rd province of China and found the people throughout the country to be friendly, orderly, and in general, happy. It definitely isn’t as crowded in Taiwan as it is in Shanghai. Taiwan and Shanghai both have 23 million people, but Shanghai puts those people into 2,239 square miles where as Taiwan has 13,892 square miles.

We (Morgan, the kids, Josie and I) got home at 10:00 pm after watching the Women’s World Cup championship game and then it was time to pack. My flight was the next day and I had to leave at 7:00 am. So I grabbed some clothes for a small carry-on suitcase and some books for my backpack and went to bed.
I went to Taiwan with fellow Olmsted Scholar “Steve.” Steve is also in the Air Force, but this is his second year of living in China. He came up with the idea of going to Taiwan during China’s week-long National Day celebration (oxymoron, week-long… day?) since everybody in China has the time off to travel, and travel they do. So to beat the crowds, we left the country and let our spouses/families deal with the crowds in China!
Flying to/from Taiwan from/to China is a confusing process. The flight to Taiwan would be a nice short flight, but due to the diplomatic difficulties between China and Taiwan there are no direct flights between them. The options are flying to Hong Kong, Macau, Korea, or even Japan, then to Taiwan. I understand flying to Korea or Japan, but it confuses me as to why flights are allowed between Macao/Hong Kong and Taiwan since those cities were returned to China ten years ago. At any rate, we flew to Macau, then we flew to Taiwan.
We spent the first couple of days in the capital, Taibei. I should probably talk about the “romantinization” systems used in the Chinese language to help non-Chinese speakers read Chinese words. The current most-widely used system is “pinyin” which was adopted by the Chinese government as the standard. Pinyin is what we use when typing text messages or on the computer. You type the pinyin, then get to see a list of characters that have that spelling, then you select which character you want. This is a tedious process, but fortunately computers present the more commonly used characters first so you don’t have to scroll through as many characters and then it predicts based on the previously used characters in the sentence which character you probably want to use. Without a romanticized language, I have no idea how the Chinese would be able to easily send electronic messages.
A system previous to pinyin used less letters, but had some weird rules that you had to remember and that led to romanticized spellings of, for example, 香港 as Hong Kong，北京 as Peiking, and 台北 as Taipei, instead of Xiang Gang, Beijing, and Taibei. Some of you old people may remember the name of China’s capital as Peiking – no, the city didn’t change its name, it just changed its spelling due to a different romantization system, but the pronounciation stays the same – and it is pronounced Beijing. That’s all to say that we spent the first couple of days in the Taiwanese capital of Taibei (prounounced with a “b”), even so Taiwan still uses the old system and spells the city Taipei. Ok, now we can move on…
Taibei was great. Since my friend and I are both university students right now in the Olmsted program, we qualified to stay at the YMCA, so we did! It was a great room, right in downtown Taibei, and very cheap… so what the heck?!
The first thing I noticed was how friendly people were. Instead of stares, I was greeted with “hello” or “ni hao” from people on the street. After checking into our hotel we went out to find some dinner. We just went to an area with lots of vendors selling food, which leads us to…
The second thing we noticed - the food was great! Unlike food in Shanghai that is bland and oily, this food was just good. We bought small portions from several shops and were pleasantly surprised to find that everything we ordered tasted great. And back to the first thing, the folks working at these food stands were friendly and patient. And they SMILED!! It was so pleasant to be there. They made jokes and were very helpful. In Shanghai they all in so much of a hurry to get the order and get away from you that there isn’t any interaction.
The third big thing we noticed was a sense of order. On the subway, passengers waited in lines to get on the train, and waited for passengers to get off the train before getting on themselves. This is a huge contrast to China – when you come to Shanghai, you’ll see how insane the subway is, with people pushing to get on the subway before people even get off. Above ground, cars stopped at red lights and pedestrian crossings – again, something they don’t do here in Shanghai. It was so nice to be in a more orderly culture. The Japanese possessed Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, and it is said that the Taiwanese learned their order and discipline from the Japanese.
Taibei - we flew into Taibei and spent two days here. The weather was perfect, comfortably warm and beautiful skies. The highlight was visiting Taibei 101, currently the world’s tallest skyscraper at 101 stories. Unlike Shanghai that has multiple skyscrapers in the world’s top 100 tallest and 2 in the top 10, there are no other very tall buildings in Taibei, so we could really see the entire city from the observatory on the 101st floor. It was an impressive sight.
Hualian – we took the train down to Hualian, a city located on the east coast of Taiwan and spent two days there. The highlight was renting scooters and driving through Taroko Gorge National Park. It was stunningly gorgeous, mountains, trees, rivers, waterfalls, tunnels and winding roads - the weather was perfect and so our ride on our little scooters was just perfect. FYI – these scooters are pretty quick and get up to 50 mph, they were a blast! The second highlight was hanging out outside of the Air Base in Hualian at the end of the runway where we watched their F-16s and C-130 taking off and landing – something about American-built warplanes that makes me happy!
Taidong – this was our next destination with plans of taking the ferry to Green Island, a resort island off the coast of Taiwan, but unfortunately a Taifeng was coming right for us. Taifeng is the word where English gets “typhoon” from. A typhoon was approaching Taiwan. While we were at a beach in Hualian, we watched pretty large wave come crashing in. Based on the weather forecasts and seeing how bad the water was getting, ferries were cancelled out to Green Island, so we got back on the train to our final destination…
Gaoxiong (spelled “Kaohsiong” in Taiwan) is Taiwan’s second largest city – we originally just planned a day here, but ended up staying three days here. Gaoxiong is on the south-side of the Taiwan and the eye of the Typhoon was hitting the north-side of the island. So it was really windy in Gaoxiong, but very little rain so we were able to walk around town and see the city. We stayed with fellow Olmsted Scholar “Mimi” who was very gracious in showing us around her city, despite the challenging weather! Gaoxiong is the city where all of your “Made in Taiwan” products get shipped from. The latest statistics show that Taiwan makes 49% of the world’s laptops – wow!
We flew back to Shanghai from Gaoxiong through Macao again. Just like that our 8 day “business trip” was over. What a great trip…

Family on the Bund ...... the 5 of us!

Here's a recent photo of the five of us from the Moon Festival. A night they spend with their families, eat "moon cake," and sit outside and look at the moon. Six more moons to go...

Suzhou, the Venice of Asia

Josie and I decided it was time to get out of town. We went to the train station and bought tickets to a little tourist town called Suzhou (population 5.7 million) about a 45 minute train ride from here. It has lots of gardens and waterways for streets. We didn't have time to take a boat through them, but hope to next time. We could take the 9:00 am train there, but the earliest tickets they had for the evening were for 9:30 that night. I asked Josie if she really wanted to do this and she did, so early Saturday morning we packed a day of supplies and off we went. This is Josie in the train station waiting area, one of the many waiting areas, plus all the people outside....people everywhere!

I had researched a few places to visit and had a map and figured we would figure it out from there. I had planned on taking the tourist buses they have to get from sight to sight. That proved to be much more complicated than I thought and so what is the next best plan? How about hop on a little moped with a trailer to get there. You have to bargain for these too, I probably paid more than the Chinese would, but the girls loved it! The first guy told me 40 RMB and I was able to get another guy for 10 RMB. Some people must think all foreigners are idiots, why would I pay him 40 RMB when I could take a taxi for 10 RMB.

The first garden we went to was beautiful, but had way to many people there and was barely enjoyable. There were tourist guides with their megaphones yelling everywhere and the paths were quite tight. Another day this place would be a great get away. Next time we may go there for a peaceful stroll and take more pics of the actual gardens. Here are just a few of the pics from the Humble Administrators Garden.

We then headed for a Buddhist temple, not really that exciting, but something new for Josie. We left there I told the taxi driver we would like to go to a place called Tiger Hill. It was recommended to me by my Chinese teacher. I thought we were heading there and he started to tell me that there would be way too much climbing with my small kids and he had a better place for me to go. I told him thanks, but that is where I wanted to go. He again said there is lots of climbing, I told him I understood what he is saying, but that is where I wanted to go. (This was all in Chinese with my mad Chinese skills!) He pulls up to a place and I didn't know what it was supposed to look like. I quickly figure out he didn't listen to me and then we start to argue about it. I told him that is what HE thinks, but I can decide for myself. I had already unloaded the girls and strollers (of course with Josie's help) out of the car. I told him I was very unhappy with him and then he tells me get back in and he will take me there. I told him no way, I then tried to pay him, and he wouldn't take it. I threw it in his car and I told him we would figure out another way to get there.

At this point the girls were very tired and they really needed to nap. They had been up since 7:30 and it was about 2:00 pm. We read a few signs and decided to go ahead and check this

place out. There were very few people there and maybe only 2 foreigners, so we were able to get the girls to sleep for about an hour while we hung out on one of the paths. The place actually

turned out to be quite beautiful (maybe mostly because it was fairly quiet), but we definitely enjoyed it. Our entrance ticket included a short ride in a boat on the river, the girls thought it was great!

The funniest part was the the following picture of kids on the water in giant beach balls rolling around like gerbils. When we first arrived, there were probably 10 kids out there playing bumper balls! How fun, dangerous, Chinese, whatever it was quite a sight!

On our way out, this little old lady attacked us to have us buy her toys for the girls. They try to just give it to the girls, hoping I will give in. I have started telling them thank you for the present and will start to walk off. They quickly walk away and take the toys with them. I left Josie with the girls to see what kind of ride we could get to the next stop. I came back and there are a few Chinese surrounding her (5 or so). Tally had started to cry and is standing up in the stroller trying to get away. The old lady that was trying to sell her toys started to tell me how dangerous this is. Using my mad Chinese skills again, I told her that if she wasn't in her face scaring her that we wouldn't be having this problem! She turned around and left. The small Chinese that I know is very useful!

We then had time for one last site and ended up at another Buddhist temple, because I wanted to be in a decent area to get a taxi and be somewhat close to the train station. These temples seem to be the same to me, a pagoda and then various statues all over. It was nothing too exciting, but the following picture made it totally worth it. Tally has what we call her Buddha Belly....the Chinese got a kick out of it too!

All day, Adayla had noticed these "lion" trashcans. I told her not to touch them because they were so dirty. We did find some trash for her to put it in it and she was so scared, she thought it was going to bite her! She didn't want to shove the trash in the rest of the way.

It was now only 6pm and we had about 3 hours to kill. We decided to just walk until we found something good to eat. We came to a McDonald's, how convenient! The girls ate a bit and were able to play on the slide. We then found a smaller version of Nanjing Lu, a huge pedestrian zone in Shanghai. We hit up a couple of the local shops selling junk that we probably didn't need, but it was fun!

The girls did quite well all day, considering all things involved, and did okay on the train. Finally about 2 metro stops before getting home they were out! What a day!