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!)

Scary stuff in my home town...

This photo, a randomly posted link off on the side of some web site or other, really caught my attention, even given all of the disasters and upheavals that have been going down in most of the world. I was even more surprised to see that it was taken in my home town of Chicago, and is apparently part of the filming of the new Transformers 3 movie.

So let me get this straight: basically, there are hundreds if not thousands of people that got together and spent untold millions of dollars to create the appearance of a disaster of epic proportions in an otherwise peaceful and prosperous city, in order to film it and show the results to millions more people worldwide, most of whom, I'm guessing, are boys between the ages of seven to sixteen. Dang, even when people are making stuff up, you can't make this kind of stuff up...

"Zhi-jia-ge, zhi-jia-ge, that toddlin' town..."

Got a small dose of instant homesickness when I passed this construction fence in downtown Chengdu the other week. For those of you who aren't familiar with one of the greatest underrated cities on the planet, it's a view of downtown Chicago at night, probably taken from the observation lounge at the top of the John Hancock building, probably lifted from a Google image search somewhere and used without permission. (Said view, incidentally, being vastly superior to the one from the Sears Tower in that instead of paying $12 or so for a ticket up to the observation deck, you are obliged to purchase an overpriced martini at $7 and up, so you get a view and a drink.) Photos like these are quite typical around the new apartment towers that are springing up all over the place, probably because they convey a sense of wealth exoticism, and exclusivity. Pair them with a poorly-translated phrase in pseudoEnglish, and you're good to go. Ahh, the power of stereotypes...

Incidentally, 芝加哥 (Zhijiage), the word for "Chicago" in Chinese, translates character for character as “of - add to - older brother", or something like that. This happens because, of course, Chinese lacks a phonetic alphabet, so foreign names are simply collections of random characters thrown together to approximate the sound of the word in question. To make things even more confusing, Chinese has a little over 400 different spoken syllables, as opposed to somewhere around 4-5,000 in a language like English. This leads to most foreign place names in Chinese, for example, being only rough approximations of the original name. This makes for some exotic-sounding places (密尔沃基 - "Mi'erwaki", or 克利夫兰 - "Kelifulan") and another whole chunk of vocabulary to learn.