...along with photographic proof that we still exist. We’re just winding down on a fairly activity filled 10-day break for National Day and the Mid-Autumn festival. Here’s a slightly condensed version of what we’ve been up to, in several horribly bloated run-on sentences:
-Watched a full mechanized military parade (insert shudder here) on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, both at home and in a campus plaza with about 500 students.
-Spent a day at our friend Joy’s parent’s house and garden plot just outside the nearby town of Pixian. Picked pomelos (a kind of big mega-grapefruit) off their tree, sat around making and eating dumplings, and watched the kids run around and play with several local kids at a park by the river that featured (drumroll please) a huge stretch of lawn to run around on!
-Went on a two-night three day mini road trip with our friend ZhouJin, a grad student in English and Jane’s running partner. One night’s stay at a temple on top of Quinchengshan, an extremely crowded holy Taoist mountain and pilgrimage site complete with winding thousand year old stairs, meditative music piped from speakers hidden in rocks, a chairlift that softly glided over palm trees, and approximately 14,652 people telling us how cute our kids are.
-Next evening of the road trip spent in Hongkou, a much more peaceful wide spot in the road in a valley up in the mountains. Watched kids play on rocks by the river. Ate fresh salmon. Repeated cycle the next morning. For more, see our photos and Jane’s comments on our Flickr site here:
http://ping.fm/kyBpK
-Got treated to a lazy day at a Chinese “country club” with all of the foreign teachers and the staff of the foreign affairs department. A country club here is a walled compound with formal gardens, courtyards with tables to sit around at and drink tea and chat, many private rooms for banqueting and card playing, a ping pong table or two, and in this case, a real playground complete with fenced in trampoline that our kids loved loved loved.
-Spent an afternoon at Jinsha, an archeological site and museum in Chengdu featuring artifacts from around 800 CE (that’s AD for all you non-archeological types). We then met our friend and former tutor Wang Tong and her son Charlie for a trip to another local park and savored the cheapo kiddie rides section until closing time, followed by a wonderful home-cooked meal prepared by Wang Tong’s mother at her house. Jane developed a nasty sneezy cold, and fell soundly asleep on the ride home after taking a combo of some traditional Chinese medicine and something similar to Contac.
-Had a lazy day at home on Friday, at least until two massive boards that had been propped up against a wardrobe fell directly onto my (already sore since June) foot. Got an involuntary tour, with the help of our intrepid Luo Bo, of a Chinese orthopedic hospital, where I spent the afternoon waiting in various lines for X-rays. Good news: my toe isn’t broken, just purple and bruised. Bad news: the ankle that has been sore since June is sore due to a bone spur, as I had started to suspect. No surgery necessary, but no badminton or long hikes with Ysa on my back until the swelling goes down. (and yes, I will give more details in a later post.)
-Saturday morning at home also. We finally figured out how to get Skype to work! Jane chatted on video for two and a half hours with her folks - it cost us a grand total of five RMB (about 80 cents) for the bandwidth! Niiiice! I then had to teach two “make-up classes” in the afternoon. Told my students that where I come from, a vacation is a vacation and that I therefore hadn’t planned anything. Had fun anyway.
Which brings us up to today, which will be a morning trip to a local toy store owned by a friend of a friend in nearby Xipu. I’m then off to Chengdu for a discussion group that Jane and I have been attending, and will get back home this evening just in time to shuffle and sort papers for my classes tomorrow, when it’s back to the routine. Incidentally, I don’t think we’ve mentioned much about what our routine exactly is, but that’s the subject of another post...
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