After our weekend swim at the pool, we walked along one of the downtown streets looking for a place to eat. I would say that this is the hardest thing we have to do on a regular basis. 99% of the places to eat have no english or even no pictures on their menu. This place had a picture on the wall of a plate of a bunch of foods arranged in a circle. We didn’t really know what to do so just said, “pork”. With that, the server was happily off. She returned a few moments later with a plate of vegetables and a plate with thinly sliced meats, which she indicated was all pork, but it was raw. Simon almost sent the plate back but I had a hunch about the trivets on the table. Sure enough, soon the chef came out with a pot of boiling hot broth, and threw the contents of the 2 plates in, instantly cooking the meat, and some long noodles as well.
Since we had been at the pool, we forgot to bring our spare forks for the girls, so they had to make do with spoons. It is not very easy to eat long noodles with a spoon, especially if you’re 3, so they resorted to using their hands. This was a source of amusement to the fellow patrons and the servers. It was all in good fun.
Everyone was especially enthralled with Madeline’s methodology:

When abroad you never know what you’ll be doing the next day. Today I was taught to make Iranian-style flat bread by our friend, Ali. He comes from a long lineage of bakers and his bread is fabulous! I never knew you could turn a wok upside down and use it for a cooking surface!! Here we are in midst of baking:

He also taught me to make halva, a delicious treat! Many thanks to Ali and we wish he and his family safe travels!

Living in a country where English is not generally spoken, combined with the use of a completely different alphabet, leads to some fairly interesting signage. Here are a few of the latest…
A gas station convenience store:

A bar, of some sort:

Just like your mother told you:

On the train:

I found Emily a replica of a cheongsam dress the other day. She LOVES it! She calls it her Chinese princess dress. I should have bought a few, but I didn’t have much money with me at the time.

Yesterday we all went for a hike. We took a short taxi ride to the edge of the city and started up the mountain road. Simon had done a reconnaissance mission a while back and scouted out this trail for us to follow. It was a bit steep at first but Emily was very helpful in getting her sister up the steep parts.


We saw many, many dragonflies and small butterflies. Among the other ‘wildlife’ we saw were nice birds, beetles, grubs, crickets and tiny frogs. This may seem boring to you but is pretty exciting for the under 6 crowd!


We hiked through varied forests, something that looked like spruce, but with bark like cedar…

There was even some bark that had some sort of wierd thing happening…

Later we came to a bamboo forest, we stopped to have a little picnic.

The hike ended at a small lake that had some touristy things at one end, but some really nice Chinese buildings, statues and sculpture at the other end.

There are a LOT of hair salons in China. Maybe their hair grows really fast…? I don’t know. So when we needed a haircut, in the below post, I decided on this one because the people inside were always really excited to see us walk by on our way to the market a few times a week. The staff seemed young and enthusiastic so I thought that was good.

Another lady at the hospital, Janet from the Phillipines, was eager to get her hair done, so I offered to go back with her and get my hair colour touched up in the process. I thought I’d go for something a little different so picked out a reddish shade, which they said they couldn’t do on my hair, so I picked out the slightly darker reddish brown. All went well and after the colour, wash and blow dry it was like the first colour I picked out. I thought that was great. THEN they proceeded to put the plastic apron on my again and seemed to be getting ready to start over. I questioned this, luckily I had my trusty Chinese-English dictionary with me, I pointed to ‘conditioner’? No, they said. In sign language they indicated that the roots did not match the ends and that they were going to fix it up. It looked ok to me but who am I to argue? I am not a hairstylist. So the process started over again, with what I could see was a darker colour. After the shampoo and blow dry, it ended up PURPLE!!! Not reddish with a tinge of purple, FULL-ON purple!

Again, with the help of my book I indicated that I was NOT happy with this, and that I liked the first colour and they had better fix it!!! Now the senior stylist took charge, he had only been consulting inbetween reading his kung-fu novel. Again the plastic apron, this time bleach. No measuring, but they did a test swatch first. In the middle of this one of the girls ran down to the nearby bakery and got me a juice and a coconut bun. I think she felt sorry for me, I had been there 6 hours. Well the story ends out well, they bleached it back to the original red, the roots are somewhat a different colour, but close enough. I grudgingly paid my $15 and went on my way. The moral of the story, don’t let anyone touch your hair if it looks ok in the first place!! By the way, Janet’s hair cut and colour turned out great!

I was in need of a haircut, and since it is so hot here, I decided that the girls should get one too. Off Emily and I went to the salon. We picked this one, of many, because when we walk by the women inside are always looking out the window and very excitedly waving to us. The women who worked there literally were jumping up and down when they saw we were actually coming in to get haircuts. Emily and I enjoyed the hair washing part, a nice scalp massage and you are lying down on a table/bed while this is happening. There was a scramble of which stylist got to work on Emily, and somewhat for me too. It was pretty quiet in there mid-afternoon so Emily got the attention of several stylists at once.

My stylist did a great job, probably considering he’d never cut anyone’s hair that was as fine as mine is. The poor guy kept trying to get some body in my hair so it ended up quite short. That’s ok, it’s hot here. As usual, the trip ended up with nearly hundreds of photos being taken of us.

When we got home, Madeline insisted on getting her hair cut, so off we went, back to the salon. They were equally excited to see me bring Maddie in, and she got the royal treatment as well.

The finished product:

At night sometimes we take a walk down the pathway beside the river. On the way home we sometimes walk across the ‘stone bridge’ which are a series of square posts sticking out of the water that you hop across. Somewhat un-nerving as the water is totally gross and I can’t imagine the number of diseases that would infect you if you fell in. We are careful. There are two rows so you can sidestep someone going the other way. The ‘bridge’ is used by young and old, the steps are about a foot square. I saw from an older photo that the water is actually quite shallow in this spot, the pillars are only about a metre high.

This is all very new development, and has enhanced the area a great deal. Our destination is a temple-like building, although I’m not sure if there is anything holy about it. I do know that it is also brand new.

This spot is a gathering place for the Chinese each night. They gather there to dance together. Not in couples, but en masse in what I’d call a gigantic line-dance. The music is modern, pop style. I’m not sure if there are specific dances for each song or if they go with the tempo of the song. Whichever, everybody seems to know which song goes with which dance.

On the way home Emily caught a tiny frog, note how hot it is, it was 31 degrees at 9pm.

We’ve discovered the ‘true’ Chinese markets. Up to now, we’ve been shuttled to the ‘Better Life Mall’ which is a large department store with a big supermarket adjacent. It has a KFC so we treat the girls to chicken and fries twice a week. A meal for 4 of us there costs about 100 yuan, or $15, three or four times more than any other meals. There is a price to pay for North American things here. Similarly, a bottle of nail polish is 70 yuan ($10), pricey considering the translators here only make 1000 yuan ($150) a month. I did the math, and it would be like a $200 bottle of nail polish to us, based on a $3000/month salary.
So we found where the Chinese shop.

This is the entrance to the open air market, with food on one side and household goods on the other side. The food is as fresh as it gets…live (or recently dead). The girls love looking around at the frogs, eels, fish, chickens, geese, ducks, and pigeons. I’ve fielded some interesting questions lately about the origins of our food. Yesterday they were eating chicken drumsticks and asked if it was from a chicken. We explained that it was, indeed, a chicken leg. To this, Maddie replied, “But the chicken will be lonely for it’s leg!”. I then had to explain that the chicken was already dead and probably not missing much at all.
Here is Emily with some frogs, and those are eels in the bucket behind her.

Ok, now I know why the driving is so crazy here. They let children of any age, get in a small vehicle and drive around. Granted, the vehicle is a giant inflatable nylon animal, but they’re in control (or not) and there are no brakes, just a gas pedal.
I totally understand their logic, it is just like real life here; you can drive anywhere on the road you want, in any direction, and all the pedestrians had better watch out for where you are going!
Click here to see the video!

Needless to say, the girls had a blast driving their giant Godzilla head!