Daddy, Daughter Day Out

Adayla and I went yesterday with 50 of my MBA classmates to a big park about an hour west of Shanghai in the name of "team building" and bonding. The original plan was to bring the whole family, but we thought better of it after looking at the schedule: depart downtown at 9 am and get back at 5 pm. So instead of a family adventure, it turned into a fun Daddy, Daughter day out.

Adayla in front of the park entrance, wearing one of my classmate's (or her new friend's) "tricky" sunglasses.

I thought we would just go to a park to go play and relax, but once I got there I realized that this wasn't just your ordinary park. It was a military propaganda park!


This park has the express purpose of building awarness of China's military to inspire future generations to support China's defense. I took a picture of the "mission statement" that says such - they even wrote it in English for whatever reason as Adayla and I were two of five non-Asians that I saw in the park, and this place was huge and packed.

You have to read this sign above!

"The youth... must, from their very childhood, establish a love for the party, the country, the socialist cause, and the People's army with their fine qualities..."

There is an old aircraft carrier there, actually it never was an actual aircraft carrier, but it's built to look just like one, with lots of planes and models of military equipment on board. At first I got a kick out of seeing large models of an A-10, SR-71, and an F-22 hanging from the ceiling. I think I may have even started to sing "I'm proud to be an American" in my mind as I saw such a beautiful tribute to American airpower that you can see behind Adayla and me...

The Air Force Academy hat is a nice touch at a Chinese military propaganda park, don't you think? I honestly had no idea!

But then as I got closer, I saw that they had RED STARS on them!! What's up with that?! I just laughed, how funny, but so wrong! They put red stars on our planes, and were taking credit for the SR-71 and F-22 as being Chinese planes... outrageous! And they're upset about biased western media when these are flat out lies!! They never had an SR-71, and will never have anything like the F-22. But if that's what the propaganda machine here wants...

Our F-22 with Chinese red stars. What the... ?!

I kept an eye out to see if they had any tankers on display, because you know, I like tankers. They didn't, so I'm including a pic here of a tanker refueling an F-22 just for kicks.

No red stars on the F-22 here!

The rest of the park had a lot of fun obstacle courses and such (again, military themed), that we divided up into groups to compete against each other. I even got to teach Adayla how to shoot a rifle. I did the aiming, Adayla did the trigger pulling. You can see the dots ("kills") on the computer screen. We're a good team.

Adayla adopted my hat for the day, but after I had "hat hair" already.

Then it was time for lunch... BBQ style! I was looking forward to nice cheeseburger, but that's not the type of meat you cook on the BBQ here in China. Instead we ate...

BBQ squid and BBQ chicken parts that we don't normally eat...

Adayla is a trooper, though, and ate everything I gave her...

...including an ice cream.

Then it was time for the kids to play. There was a huge playground area where Adayla played hard for an hour. This is just one of the many fun slides this playground had.

While the families with kids played at the playground, everyone else went to the lake and had a rowing competition. We met up with them right at the end to see the finish. Everyone was pretty exhausted, so we kicked back for a while and chatted.

They then encouraged Adayla to sing for everybody and she taught them "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes." She definitely doesn't shy away from the spotlight. We need to teach her some Chinese songs to sing because other than those songs, she spoke Chinese all day. I'm very impressed with her Chinese skills (and jealous).


Ok, final comment on the day. Being at the park the entire day, we went to a couple of different bathrooms as you can imagine. All of the bathrooms had the same problem. They had sinks with running water to wash you hands, but the drain for the sink water is down below on the floor. If you look closely you can see the water dropping from the sink onto the floor.


The result is that all of the bathroom floors were a mess. I couldn't believe that every bathroom had this problem. A multi-million dollar military propaganda park and they can't even spend the couple bucks to drain the water directly from the sink. I really didn't like this, especially with Adayla...

Overall it was a great day. I had fun with my classmates, saw firsthand how the government's propaganda machine works, and had a blast with Adayla!