On the advantages of having your spouse and oldest child living in the same time zone with you instead of having to communicate with Skype over a 13 hour time difference (14, once it went back to Standard Time)

I could go on for a while, but I think the title of the post says it clearly enough...

La vie quotidienne

I was reminded the other evening, while talking to another teacher here, that one of the joys in China is the pleasure of sitting around and simply watching things happen.  Here, for your viewing pleasure, a couple more videos of life on the basketball court next to the primary school on a Sunday afternoon, circa late September / early October.

Part the first:  In which Z tools around randomly on his bike, Y follows two girls that come by with a kitten in a small box, a random passerby talks on her cell phone, and a clump of children then run off to points unknown...



Part the second:  In which Z and friend play a Pokemon-type game with small circular trading cards, Y experiments with a plastic fake guitar, and someone in the background says ”对“ ("dui" = right, okay) repeatedly so fast that it almost sounds like machine gun fire.


Part the third:  In which Y shreds on the toy guitar, Z loses a round of rock/paper/scissors, and a toddler and her mom take their leave. 

Found in translation

Here's a challenge:  Can I decipher the note from my son's first grade teacher before my son finishes his homework?  Before you answer, here's the note:

"我校定于本周五开秋季学生运动会，请家长于周五早上8：10分准时送孩子了到校，中午11：00到校接孩子。下午不到校。
请家长勿必协助做好以不工作：
1。周五必须穿上校服。请家长检查校服拉链坏的及时修理。
2。请家长为孩子准备一双白色运动鞋（周五穿）
3。长发女孩子要求马尾辫 （高一些）；
4。 男孩子头发长了，请家长带去理发。做到清清爽爽。
谢谢客位家长！"

Piece of cake, right?  I suppose I could have asked a student or an English-speaking neighbor for help, but since I already had the online dictionary and Google translate up on the computer, Zekey and I spent a fun half hour working together figuring out which character said what. 

(For those uninitiated into the wonders of typing Chinese on the computer:  if you know a character's pronunciation, you can simply type it into the computer, choose the character you want, and there it is.  Unless you've got the pronunciation wrong, of course.  If you don't know what a character sounds like, then you can draw it using your mouse into an online dictionary, and that will give you several character choices, one of which will hopefully be correct.  Before computers, you would have had to look up a character by its most important stroke, or radical, and hope that you find the right one. This is where I get very jealous of anyone learning a language that has a phonetic alphabet...)

Anyway, since that was a thirty minute investment in basic data entry, I thought I'd share the results that Google Translate came up with:

Our school is scheduled to open Friday games fall students, parents Friday morning at 8:10 am sharp to send their children to the school, the school at 11:00 to pick up their kids. Not at school.
Please parents do not do will help to not work:
1. Friday must wear school uniform. Please check the school uniform zipper bad parents timely repairs.
2. Please prepare a pair of white parents to their children shoes (wear Friday)
3. Asked a girl with long hair ponytail (higher);
4. Long hair, boys, parents bring haircut. So cool-cool.
Thank you class parents!

Poetry, no?  Certainly much better than anything I could do on my own...

My Kingdom for a telephoto lens!

Had a borrowed camera last Sunday afternoon while watching the kids ride bikes in their usual kid rodeo area in front of the primary school.  Most of the time, a small portable point and shoot is more than enough, but on occasion, it would be nice to be able to zoom in a bit closer.  Still, with a little bit of cropping, I was able to get a few decent pics out of the deal, mostly of Ysa and friends because Zekey was zooming around too fast.  (You should have seen the pictures that got away...)




 
 



 

Back in the swing of things

Image:  National Day holiday travelers in the North Train Station plaza, Chengdu

A quick Sunday update to all, as the students stream back from almost a week off of classes from the National Day break.  Jane and Xander are still in the States, return date still not fixed, but now estimated to be late October or early November.  Ysa, Zekey, and I had a pleasant, if relatively non-eventful week off, mostly at home, with visits to our friends the Gaos and their farm, and several other gatherings with classmates and neighbors. 

The October weather, aside from a couple of gloriously clear days caused by factory shutdowns and the general lack of car emissions over the National Day Holiday, has been its typical lead sky overcast, with just a hint of nippiness in the air.  I'm realizing more and more just how solar powered I am, and I'm getting good at figuring out my mood lately.  Annoyed at the kids?  Weather related.  Not feeling like doing much? Weather related. General blahs?  Weather related. 

The good news?  Anything weather related usually disappears soon after diagnosis.  Or a strong green tea caffeine fix, whichever comes first.  And spicy food.  Oh, and as a further preventative, I've taken to burning incense, and lighting lots of candles at night to compensate for deficiencies in the red end of the spectrum outdoors.

Waitaminnit...  Green tea?  Spicy food?  Incense and candles?  Lots of red?  Hmmm, sounds familiar, but just can't place it....



Oh, yeah, right.  So culture is influenced by environmental factors!  Whattya know?  (Jane, don't be surprised if our apartment resembles a Taoist temple by the time you get back...)

Explaining things, continued (the kid's turn)

From the Slow Boat family video archives, the Xander and Zekey Electricity Show!  (First aired sometime last spring; global syndication rights now negotiable...)

Okay, I've tarnished his FBI file for good, now...

Around the first of May, Xander was sworn into the Young Pioneers, which means more or less that he's in the Honor Roll, except with the added bonus that he could also be on track to join the Communist Party of China. The main thing is that he gets to wear a red scarf every day to school, and he gets a nifty plastic pin with a red star on it. Xander, externally motivated student that he is, was crushed last fall when he didn't get a red scarf like the "good kids" in the class, and thought for a while that he was a Bad Student, so now he's been officially recognized.

And yes, teachers in China (well, at least in Xander's school) are very up front about separating the sheep from the goats in that way. Good students often get to sit up front close to the teacher, with the bad kids towards the back. For a couple of days, Xander refused to play with a friend of his because the teacher had mentioned that she hadn't done her math homework well enough. Yeah, we had to have a talk with him about that one...

Turns out that he hadn't gotten his red scarf last fall because, understandably, his teachers weren't quite sure what we as parents would think. We said fine, as long as they ignored all of the reports to the Central Committee that he was sure to make on us (joke!), and so he got his scarf in an all school awards ceremony, complete with an honor guard, a speech to the gathered parents from a vice president of the university, and, of course, synchronized dance performances.

The music that was playing while they were being led up to the stage? The theme song from the 1960 American Western The Magnificent Seven. (Which was itself a copy of Kurasawa's Seven Samurai.)

Of course.

Ysa's big number four

Also before I left: Ysa turned four years old, which shouldn't be terribly surprising, as she turned three around a year ago, I guess. But there's always that little bit of, "Wow, where did that year go off to?" She had a party at kindergarten and a party at home, and a splendid time at both, with new friends that she's getting to be old enough to appreciate and interact with in ways that she didn't when she was three.





Oh, and by the way, you'll pardon me if many of my posts while here in the States are about regular ol' family events in China, right? It's a bit strange to be in my home country, but away from my home city, and missing family that are at home on the opposite side of the world... Guess I did know the risks of such surrealism when I signed up now, didn't I?

Two Years Ago - Domesticity

Travel the world over, and no matter if it's a grass hut or Buckingham Palace, one of the first things you're likely to hear from your hosts is "oh my gosh, sorry about the mess!". I suspect that this is because, deep down inside, most of us (Buddhist monks excluded) have an awkward relationship with our Stuff, and how the state and amount of said Stuff compares will other people's Stuff.

Or maybe the place is a bit cluttered because, oh, it's Saturday morning, you're planning to travel back to the States on Monday, and you are procrastinating all the packing and planning you need to do by just a bit and taking pictures of your apartment for some silly "then and now" project that you're blogging about. (Yes, that would be me I'm talking about...)

In any case, since I've had many friends ask us what our apartment in China is like, I present you, in all of its eternally transitional glory... our apartment! (And if you ask me, I think the 2011 version looks better. Don't you?)

2009:


2011:


.



.

Two years ago - now, with added family members!

Continuing on where I left off, here are some pictures we took in 2009 of our apartment in the first hour after we brought up our luggage, followed by the 2011 versions, taken sometime last month.

2009:


2011:


2009:


2011:

Home is where 2/3 of your kids are...

...and, since Xander and I won't be there for a while, I thought I'd fire up the blog by posting some pictures of the kids that we took before we left for the States. Missing you guys!





Incidentally, Xander is doing fine after surgery, and is now recovering nicely. I probably won't be covering too much of our current activities in the U.S. on this blog, but we are emailing periodic updates to friends and family, as well as posting on Facebook, etc. Want to know more? Leave a comment, or drop us a line - we'd love to hear from you!

Two Years Ago!

Two years ago at this time, we were in Pennsylvania at a training conference, headed via Chicago to China at the end of July. Now, two years later, we're in China, headed via Chicago to Pennsylvania at the end of July. I was looking though our umpteen million stored photos on our computer in my never-ending quest to free up space on our hard drive, and I was struck by how much some things have changed since then.



So, I've been setting off around campus to revisit a few sites that I first photographed two years ago, to get the "after" version of things. (Not that anything is finished mind you - just in a further stage of development...) Coming in the next couple of days or weeks then, a few posts on 2009 vs. 2011. Isn't time travel fun?

Happy Fourth of July!

On this, the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of my native land, we here at Slow Boat would like to take this opportunity to share a particularly, ummm..., patriotic (?) moment from about a month ago. God Bless America! (and whatever other country you happen to find yourself in...)

The big news!

About a month ago now, we found out that Xander will need fairly major surgery within the next year to correct some bone growth issues in his forearms. (One of the other big reasons this blog was silent for a bit recently...) After many many calls back and forth, and many many people who have been invaluable in helping us in so many ways, we got confirmation that he is covered to have the surgery at Shriner's Hospital in Philadelphia at the end of July. Nervewracking, but good news, indeed.


We weren't actually in this department ever, but ya gotta love China sometimes for telling it like it is...

And just a couple of days ago, we got our plane tickets booked, so it looks like we're doing this, doesn't it? We'll be in Chicago for a bit to get acclimated, then on to Philadelphia for the surgery, then recovery after that. There will be a tricky shuffle as Jane comes out with Zekey and Ysa for a couple of weeks, then I go back with Z and Y at the beginning of September to start the school year, while Jane stays in the US with Xander until he gets the green light to travel back to China. (Although arranging all of this via email, and Skype calls back and forth has made it all seem very virtual indeed..)

So the upshot of all this is that Xander and I will be in the States for most of this summer. Starting in just a bit more than two weeks! I don't know what I'll end up writing on the blog coming up in the next couple of months, though I'm guessing that I'll keep more of the personal hospital-related news over on Facebook for those that know us. I've got a big backlog of China related news and interesting links to keep me busy posting, that's for sure. Or maybe you'll get a lot of links to YouTube videos and pictures of cats with funny sayings underneath. Or I might save my energy and not post at all until the fall, who knows? (Though this doesn't mean I don't like you. I do, really and truly!)

Dance Dance Fever

June first is children's day in China, so the day before, schools across the country are preparing their choreographed dance routines. The kindergarten and primary school on our campus were no exceptions, so Jane and I spent a fun-filled (and sometimes surreal, and okay, I admit it, a little boring at times) morning and afternoon watching our kids join in the festivities. And of course, there were bucketloads of cute.





And a lot of stage makeup, even for the boys.



A wonderfully synchronized time was had by all.

Jane Z, teaching ninja

Yet another way that Jane rocks the house, now with new added teaching mojo...


When she finally gets her interview in the New York Times Magazine, this oughta be the cover picture, don't you think?


This photo will accompany the article, of course...