We went to our local, favorite food court for breakfast. Nothing new except poor Claire had to finally use the potty while we were out. It went better than I thought it would. She must have really had to go to have made the choice to use the interesting facilities. Then we headed to the super market again. It’s really interesting trying to buy such things as laundry soap when you can’t read any of the labels. No idea what I bought, but I am hopeful it was Oxy Clean and some sort of laundry detergent. The next step is trying to negotiate the washer and dryer in our apartment. It’s all in Chinese…I tried it on my own, but I couldn’t get it to work. I didn’t feel quite so bad when I had someone come to translate the words and it wasn’t my fault the machine wasn’t working. So…now I have a load of very wet laundry with hopes someone will be coming tomorrow to repair the machine.
The kids and I decided to go check out the park across the street today. Xian Jia Lu park, It‘s really a nice park. It has basketball courts, a climbing area, a nice water way that floats through the middle. We saw several turtles and Koi fish swimming in it. The native children were trying to catch the wild critters in the water. We also saw several wild cats. They were obviously nursing baby kittens so I would imagine there are many more than we saw.
I have noticed two very young children, not much older than babies wearing very interesting pants. Both of them were boys and around 12-18 months old. The reason I know they weren’t wearing diapers is their bums and other non mentionables were hanging out. I tried to get a picture (not of the bum, but of the pants…I’m not sure it turned out….I didn’t want to make any more of a spectacle of myself than I already am). The pants are hard to explain except that there is a slit from the front to the back and then normal legs and normal waist band. I assume it’s so they can use the potties I described earlier, but they are so young. My children were potty trained very early and these little guys were much younger than any of them. Having dental hygiene as my prior profession I judge children’s age by how many teeth they have and these kids were definitely no older than 18 months. Just another interesting observation; I am curious to get back home and ask my friend Mei what the deal is.
We are getting tired of being gawked at (and it’s only day 4 of a 45 day trip). Aiden and I did an experiment today. We walked down the street and counted how many people DIDN’T stare at us. I’m not talking about causally glancing at us, I’m talking about non-stop watching from the moment they see us until they pass, and many of them keep their heads turned for quite awhile past us. This picture is a picture of people standing in line to have their picture taken with Claire (you can see Claire in the lower right corner of the picture). Claire was a really good sport about this. As you can see in the picture it wasn't just chinese people, but Indian people too. Every where we go people stop us so they can have their picture taken with her. This particular situation got out of control, it went on for several minutes with many, many people taking their pictures with her. One person started it and then others thought, "wow what a great idea"...or maybe they didn't have a clue and thought she was someone famous and they didn't want to miss out. I don't get it?!?
The school age children that we have seen are very intrigued by the kids. We plan to go play basketball at the local place next week and start interacting with the kids. This should be interesting. Anyway Aiden and I did continued our experiment for a short amount of time. We counted 7 people that didn’t stare after we had passed 50 people. We didn’t count the people on the buses, bikes or scooters (entire bus loads of people stare at us as they drive by…not just a few, but I swear every single person). This is a stretch for Aiden and I who prefer to not be the center of attention. I guess we will be doing some stretching in the next month. We try to just smile at everyone and not let it bother us, but it’s challenging at times. Claire on the other hand loves the attention. Riley who also loves attention says, why don't they want their picture taken with me? Poor guy, wrong color hair I guess.
