Simon and Richard celebrated the American holiday with an early morning hike up a local peak, Zhong Po Mountain. It had a lake near the beginning, that may have paddleboats on it they think.

Along the way it was bamboo forest, and spruce higher up.

At the top was an observatory with views of the mountains beyond.


Here is some interesting fungi with a beetle eating the ants that were attracted to the fungus:

Not to be outdone by the Canadians, the 2 American brothers organized a fireworks display on the evening of July 4. Richard bought a huge block of large fireworks, for only $15. He also got 50 roman candles, one for each state. We had fun setting them off.


Richard and Gene are finished their stay here in Huaihua on July 7, and we will be sad to see them go.

Every weekend, weather permitting, the willing (and able) participants are loaded into the van and cars and taken on a ‘field trip’. I kind of feel like I’m back in school on these. So our first field trip was to a village from the Dong Dynasty. For those of you unfamiliar with Chinese pronounciation (almost all of you I think) it is pronounced TONG. News to me, good thing we have interpreters!
Anyways, this was a spot about 40 minutes out of Huaihua beside a small lake. The village was made entirely of wood and had the cool architechtural style that we associate with China.


The girls enjoyed running along the long hallways and climbing the stairs to the upper levels. Emily thought the big iron wok looked like a giant’s soup bowl. I’d love to see the fire they light in that!

We were served a meal which consisted of no less than 10 different dishes. Seated at our table were 3 children and a Muslim couple so there was way too much for us to eat at one sitting. We were able to take a fair bit of it back with us since we really enjoyed it!
After our meal there was a cultural dance performance which was quite interesting. We couldn’t understand a word that the announcer was saying (there were many Chinese visitors as well), but that’s ok.

As most of you probably know, we LOVE a party. So, we decided to honour our country’s heritage with a Canada Day celebration here in China. I brought a small Canadian flag to the local bakery, Will Long Cake (nice name!), so that I could order a cake with the Canadian flag on it. Even with my translator present, this process took about a half hour. When asked if I wanted fruit on it, I mentioned that cherries would be nice, and anything else except the cherry tomatoes that seem to be present on many cakes. You know, a tomato is actually a fruit! I didn’t say anything about the parsley that is also seen on the top of cakes, and yes, I got some. We were very interested to see what the final product was, and I am happy to say it was a success! Pink IS a shade of red, so no matter that the flag is pink. It looked and tasted great!

We also ordered some pizza from ‘Champion Pizza’ the local pizzeria. I have to say they did a good job too, much better than the two pizza offerings we had in Shanghai. These guys should give Pizza Hut a lesson or two. Firstly, they DO included tomato sauce over the crust, and the toppings were rather similar to what we expected. We ordered a Hawaiian and an “All-American”, which is a pepperoni pizza. Other patients brought some crackers, chips, nuts and watermelon to the party too.

Simon put together a bunch of photos depicting our life in Canada and played them on his computer during the party, and one of the staff brought out their big speakers so we could listen to the audio of our going away party in Revelstoke when Simon’s band, The Sofa Kings, played.
It was great to get most of the patients out together on a hot summer night to enjoy some good stories and laughter together. Miriam brought some nail polish and did the girls and some of the ladies nails too!

The guys especially enjoyed Simon’s fishing photos and a few diehards stayed late to watch 2 of his fishing movies. I say diehards because as soon as the sun starts setting, the mosquitos come out. I ran for cover to the comfort of our room.

I think we would have done Canada proud by our celebration in a part of the world so far (physically and culturally) from where we call home.

I’ve already given a brief accord of my treatments, but did not have any photos to illustrate at the time. We’ve managed to take a few photos, which, according to our instructional manual, is forbidden. You know me, I don’t follow rules if I can get away with it.
Here is a photo of one of my acupuncture sessions. As you can see, they are concentrating on my legs and arms. There is also one on each side of my temple. It varies from day to day. I am constantly amazed at how deep the needles go. The needles seem longer than the width of my wrist and I am pretty sure I can feel them touching the skin on the other side.

The past few days my acupuncture has stopped. It seems they do not do acupuncture on women ‘at that time of the month’. Instead I have points that are warmed up with an incense-like candle made up of the herb called ‘mugwort’. It starts with my centre, over my belly and a few on each leg. This treatment, also called moxibustion, stimulates the circulation.
After that I still have the massage, or ‘tui na’, on my arms and legs. I think the purpose of the massage is two-fold; to stimulate circulation to the area, and to coax the muscles back into full mobility, much like what a physiotherapist would do.

It seems that one can’t believe what they see on the internet. I for one, should know that. The gleaming white building with greenery surrounding that is shown on the website is either very old or someone is a photoshop expert.

This is the hospital, not so nice to look at from the outside, but it is clean and nice on the inside, which is what really counts. The staff here are great, and the fellow patients all speak highly of the treatment quality.
I started my treatments yesterday. As I had been forewarned, the acupuncture is quite painful compared to what I’m used to. Not for the squeamish of needles for sure! In Canada the needles generally go in about 1cm, here they put them right up to the hilt, about 4-5cms. It feels like the wrist ones go right through my arm, I think they almost do! And the ones in the fleshy part between thumb and forefinger I can feel under my mid-palm. Luckily I have a high pain tolerance and I remind myself that this is my healing journey. The ‘massage’ of my arms, legs, hands and feet is definitely not relaxing! I am wrung out, kneaded, slapped, shaken and ‘ironed’ like a bunch of laundry. I guess it stimulates the circulation, how could it not?! I also drink herbal tea twice a day, a lovely cup of dirt-tasting liquid. I knew all this before I arrived, so it is not a shock. Like we always say, “Every day is an adventure!”.

Huaihua is a city of about 5 million and growing. We know this, in part, because we can see the changes happening daily. There is construction near to us where they are building a new road, to connect to the bridge that has already been built, the road just hasn’t made it there yet. Also we sneakily use Google Earth to orient ourselves with our neighbourhood, and those images are rather outdated. We say sneakily because we don’t want any Chinese to know we have this VPN encoding system, since the Big Red Brother is watching you.
Some interesting transportation options always in 2nd/3rd world countries, this gives the phrase ‘wide load’ another meaning:

There are motorcycle taxis, you can tell it’s a taxi because it has an umbrella awning on it.
We went to the ‘Better Life Mall’ to the big supermarket. They employ 2-3 people per aisle to help you make your choices. I’m not one for full-service shopping so I think this is a bit annoying. Here’s the girls with their new set of fans:

We took the train from Shanghai to our final destination, Huaihua. It was a 20 hour journey so we got a ‘soft sleeper’ which is a 4 person cabin with beds. It was pretty comfy and the girls loved the bunks. Lucky for us there were two other kids about the same age as our girls, who could speak English! They were Chinese-Australians on the way to visit their grandparents. Funny how our first real conversation with someone was with a 6 year old.
The countryside was very lush and green, and with all the rain, we saw much flooding and many engorged rivers. There was not much for city life along the way, all quite rural. It looks like a tough existence for many.

When we finally made it to Huaihua we faced the task of getting our heavy luggage and 2 kids down and up sets of stairs to get out of the station. Of course there was someone offering assistance, or rather grabbing our bags and speaking rapid Chinese and starting to walk away. He was probably about 60 years old and managed to take our 2 heaviest bags. When we gave him money at the end he wanted more so we doubled it and then he tried for more. Funny, even non-English speaking people understand, “Bye, bye” and he and all the onlookers laughed that we did not fall for his big money scheming. Our pickup was not evident, since our train arrived an hour late, so we waited in the front of the station, again surrounded by 25-30 curious onlookers. I managed to convince someone to loan me their phone so we could call for our ride. While we were standing there waiting I glanced around, and saw this above us, to me, I think she looks like she’s fondling her nipple and flipping everyone the bird, quite a welcome to Huaihua!

After a day of rest following our long flight, we managed to take in some of the attractions of Shanghai. To us small city folk, the city itself was quite an attraction, especially at night. It seems that every available surface is lit up at night.
We saw scooters with rope lights covering them, trees with lights that fell like shooting stars and every imaginable colour of lights on almost all commercial buildings. Many of the lights on the buildings were not static, but changing colours and patterns. Even the many elevated highways had lights (and flower boxes) lining the sides of them. Emily and Madeline really enjoyed any rainbow lights they saw.

We took an hour long river cruise at dusk, where you sit on the upper level of the boat and viewed the lights on the buildings along the river’s edge. On the west side of the river is old Shanghai, with beautiful colonial architecture, all lit up in yellow. The opposite side of the river houses the many ultra-modern skyscrapers and the Oriental Pearl tower.
Amazingly enough, all these buildings have gone up in the last ten years. As I asked a police office for directions to the nearest ‘chuan’ (boat) I was overheard by a friendly Chinese woman. Immediately she grabbed my arm and started speaking rapid fire Chinese indicating that they were going to same place. The group of 4 Chinese women, all wearing hot pink polo shirts, became our fast friends. They accompanied us the entire evening and helped us get the best seats on the boat. Emily sat on one of their laps for much of the boat ride.

The next day we visited Expo. The theme this year was “better city, better life”. We visited the pavillions for Canada, Hungary, Malta, the Caribbean, and Australia. It was quite a huge venue so we did a lot of walking around looking at the pavillions from the outside. As with everything else in Shanghai, it was really impressive at night. We enjoyed the Australian pavillion the most, it had a great multimedia show on a revolving stage that lasted about 10 minutes. We lucked out with our timing because we got to see a performance of a group of young people playing violins and cellos, accompanied by a drummer and keyboardist. We recognized some Rolling Stones and Supertramp and also played some classical Chinese music. All this just when we stopped for a few Aussie meat pies and a VB for Simon and a Crown Lager for me. I’m realising that, with Western-style food, the price may look quite cheap, but the portion is tiny. I might have called them Aussie meat tarts instead of pies.

The Canadian pavillion had a cool plasma screen type thing under a few inches of water. When you splashed the water or touched the screen it caused a different picture to show up underneath. There also was a wall with blocks that came in and out in different shapes like an inukshuk or a totem pole or just a collage of photos. I tried out the bike that you could pedal and cause the screen ahead of you to move and show an animated movie of travelling through different parts of Canada. The feature movie was a little uninspiring, since it featured only cities, which, in my opinion, is not the most picturesque parts of Canada. We enjoyed some Chinese-style poutine and a few Carlsberg beers while chatting with the Quebecois restaurant manager. He’s been travelling in Asia since 2003 and gave us a few pointers of where to go.

The UK pavillion is made up of a bunch of stiff fibre optics of some sort, Emily thought it looked like a giant porcupine. I think her description pretty much covers it. I thought it was really cool. Also neat looking was the Luxembourg pavillion, which reminded Emily of the crooked house from the nursery rhyme.

The Norwegian pavillion offered odd-looking monoframe bikes to ride down the spiral pathway, the lineup was too long for us.

The following day we were planning on going to the wild animal park to see some pandas, but we didn’t get moving early enough and it was quite far from where we were staying. Instead we went to the Ocean Aquarium. It was definitely set up for kids with all the exhibits down low and several aquarium tunnels. We really liked the tunnel under all the sharks.

Hmmmm, wonder if anyone is listening to this advice…?
After the aquarium we went to a tunnel of a different sort. It’s called the Shanghai Tourist Tunnel, and you ride a small pod-like car on a track under the river. It’s only a 5 minute trip but the tunnel is covered with really cool psychedelic lights! Kinda touristy but we really liked it.
Tomorrow we head to Huaihua (pronounced wai-wa) on the train.

Well, we’ve arrived in China, after a long but not-too-bad flight. The girls were exemplary travellers, except for a small meltdown for Maddie landing in Shanghai. It had been a long journey for a 3 year old.

We were happy to find, at 3am, that our Ramada hotel room was, in fact a suite, and that we have two rooms; which means one for us and the girls sleep in the ‘living room’. This is the nicest hotel either of us have stayed in together, at about the same rate as a motel in Canada. This hotel is also great because it is our only enclave of (partial) English speaking people. We would have been hard pressed to buy a train ticket for our next journey otherwise.

Shanghai is a huge city, full of lights. It mixes the old and the new, where hip, young people talk on their iphones next to someone driving a moped carrying 12 water cooler bottles and a passenger. Crossing the street is an exercise in caution, as pedestrians are the low man on the totem pole. Each street has a lane of two way moped/bike traffic then two or more lanes of vehicles then another lane of two way, two-wheeled traffic. It seems that anyone turning left doesn’t care who is crossing the street and the two wheeled vehicles just keep on going anytime. Together these make for a lot of possibilities of being run over. We just try to stick close to the Chinese while crossing the street, as they don’t seem bothered by this at all.

Things as we know them can be very different here. Simon was happy to learn that there is a Starbucks beside our hotel, he wanted to ease into his non-Canadian coffee experience. I also am fond of my chai tea lattes, but there was no chai tea listed. Instead they have a green or black tea latte. This is what I got, it’s actually quite delicious and I think I’m going to miss them. Going to Starbucks is definitely a luxury for the Shanganese, as it costs about 5 times more than a coffee at a bakery or anywhere else, about $5 Cdn.

Emily is a picky eater so we tried ordering cheese pizza for her a few times. The first time we got a flat bread with spring onions inside it. Needless to say that was nixed. The second time it took 3 waiters to explain that we wanted only cheese on the pizza. Apparently that means no tomato sauce too. Tonight it was late so we tried Pizza Hut. Altogether pretty good, but still not up to Emily’s standards. She is going to end up eating a lot of rice on this trip. Madeline is much more adventurous with food, she liked the dumplings and spring rolls I had at lunch-time. I’ve been sticking mostly to dim sum dishes, as they are a little simpler and I figure contain less of the unknown. They also often have photos on the menu, which is really the only way we can order anything. Our attempts in using our phrasebook are usually met with blank stares, it’s all about the pronounciation, and we definitely are lacking in that department.

At Expo I had to get used to the lack of personal space. There are numerous lineups, and the person behind you is literally right behind you. It’s ok and I only had to give one guy who inadvertently stuck his tripod in my ribcage the ‘big elbow’ as I like to call it. The concept of not passing someone in a lineup seems to be lost on the Chinese as well.

This may sound like a negative rant but I like to see the differences in things. The Chinese we’ve met are very generous and eager to be friendly. They seem to be very interested in us and are always giving us a smile and a hello or ni hao; especially if they also have children. The photo-taking is another story…