December in Shanghai

The past few weeks have been full of travel for Matthew, school holiday parties for the kids, and non-stop tai tai activities for Allison.  But on Friday we're off to Vietnam (via an overnight in South Korea, of course), and we'll spend Christmas and New Year here:



We're kinda excited.

Thanksgiving Party

As most of you know, Matthew works for the Institute for Sustainable Communities, a US-based nonprofit that does great work related to climate change, environment, strengthening communities (oh, and did I mention that I worked there for a little bit too...).  Because it's a US org, all staff get Thanksgiving day off.  We thought this would be a great opportunity to have a Thanksgiving party for Matthew's Chinese colleagues and their families.  Most had heard about Thanksgiving for years and even got the day off, but they had never had a real American T-giving meal and celebration.    We had it all planned for Thanksgiving day until someone pointed out that just because ISC staff get the day off doesn't mean that their spouses and children get the day off too.  On to plan b -- celebrating Thanksgiving on December 1st. 

It involved a lot of cooking and cleaning and creative acquisition of ingredients (thanks Elizabeth!).  We ordered two smoked turkeys from Bubba's BBQ.  My sister smuggled in some fresh cranberries, fried onions, Stove Top Stuffing (good thing as it's $10/box here in Shanghai). 

We had 30+ staff and family members from the Shanghai and Guangzhou offices, two turkeys, seven pies, 20 hand painted, hand turkeys, and one hilarious football game.

Some of the staff from Guangzhou came early to help cook.

Weekend in Chengdu

We had a wonderful visit with my sister Elizabeth, AKA "Aunt Lizzy".  As soon as she arrived , we whisked her away for a weekend in Chengdu.  I'd heard nothing but wonderful things about Chengdu, and I wasn't disappointed.  It's not really a beautiful city, but it's just got such a nice feel to it, and such great food, and PANDAS.  We were also excited to see Naomi and Townes' former Mandarin tutor, Zoe, in Chengdu.  She grew up nearby and recently returned to take a teaching job. 

We weren't the only tourists at Tianfu Square.

Watching candy animals being made at People's Park.

In Other News...

Updates in no particular order:

We've had a long-standing leak problem in our apartment -- mystery water under the floor wicking its way up the walls in various rooms.  Our landlady put us up in some fancy temporary digs while her contractors tried to find the source.  We stayed only a few blocks away, but it felt like a world away.  The area is more Western, more isolated, and more likely to make me lose my mind or burst into tears.  While it had a very nice playground, I hated it.  Made me appreciate our more Chinese neighborhood.  I missed pajama man.  I missed the fruit man.  I missed the vegetable chopping ladies.  I'm very glad to be home.

Happy Halloween (a little late...)

Halloween was surprisingly a big deal here in Shanghai.  Big parties at Eli's and Naomi & Townes' schools.  Here are the highlights:

Zombie from Candyland and All Aspects of Evil.



The other 4th grade class at the school Halloween parade.

Mr. Evil and his class.

Naomi and her friend Holly Catwoman.

Eli preparing treats to bring to school for Halloween.

Eli and his class singing Halloween songs.

Eli and Teacher Vivianna.

Scariest costumes ever.

 

Good Times with Grandparents

We're lucky.  We just are.  No matter where we move to, both sets of grandparents are game for visiting -- or in some cases, even moving nearby!  One of the cool things that I see every single day here in Shanghai, and likely all over China, is grandparents taking care of their grandchild (and yes, here in China it is grandchild, not grandchildren).

Grandparents are often the primary source of day care here.  It's not unusual to see a granddad out alone with a teeny baby.  Grandparents together feeding, caring, playing with their grandchild for the bulk of the day.  I love watching it.  Love watching grandparents play such an integral role in the lives of their grandchild.  Then I think to myself, what kind of moron drags their kids 7,000+ miles away from their two amazing sets of grandparents.  Morons like me and Matthew.  Sorry Charles and Gloria and Roger and Joyce.  We love you all very much and will come home soon.

Golden Week

This week has been a Golden Week here in China -- basically a week holiday to celebrate China's National Day (Oct. 1st) and the Mid-Autumn Festival, or Moon Festival.  Matthew and the kids are all home from work/school.  Lots of people travel during this week.  I read somewhere that they were expecting 7 million people to visit Shanghai.  I think we saw them all on the subway.

Matthew and Eli started the week with new haircuts.  Eli got a 40 minute haircut.  No joke.  Complete with hair washing, blow dry, and style (with product!). 

Totally Tai Tai

Allison -- what are you doing now that the kids are in school?  I get that a lot.  From all of you.  And even if you haven't asked it outloud, I know you're thinking it!  What is it that you do now that you are a stay-at-home-mom without any stay-at-home-kids?  It is rather ridiculous.  Am I really a Tai tai or an "accompanying spouse" or a "lady who lunches"?  How did this happen?   Should I just embrace it and enjoy it or run for the hills? 

Naomi and Townes started piano lessons.

I checked out the American Women's Club of Shanghai.  I tried to find my people there among the sparkly shirts and expensive shoes.  I spied one woman in a t-shirt and ponytail and no makeup.  Hey, there she is, my people.  Turns out she was a college kid visiting her mom who dragged her to the meeting.  Fail.


I've been to a few coffee mornings sponsored by Shanghai Mamas.  These are nice.  Women from all over the world, UK, Singapore, Brazil, USA, Netherlands, all trying to figure out their new identity and where to buy cheddar cheese.  One new friend from the group and I took a sightseeing bus tour together and have plans for other outings. 

Tips for the Day

Two important things, always use the tooths and never leave your baby on the road.

And in Shanghai, they got bored...

Just a quick post to share this great article from the China Daily News -- the largest English language paper in China.  It highlights the work of our friend and Matthew's colleague Pan Tao, and his amazing farm -- Eco Land Farm (NOT Ego Land as stated in the article).  Completely ridiculous picture of Matthew and Naomi and I.  I wonder if people now think that carrots at "Ego" Land Farm come out of the ground with eyes and a nose?

A Triumph of Packaging

Last week was India – 3 days in New Delhi, 2 days in Hyderabad. I traveled with my colleague Elaine, who was delighted to find a road in Delhi named after renowned Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Elaine and I share an erstwhile passion for 19th century Russian novels, and we both found it odd yet characteristic of India to have a road named after a man who lived thousands of miles away, never visited Delhi, and most likely never gave the place much thought.

India is that kind of hodgepodge. A melting pot that puts the United States to shame. It has 22 official local languages (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, and so on), yet the lingua franca is the imported language of English. People from different parts of India – close enough to travel back and forth in an hour – can’t communicate in their own languages, but can often get by in English. Although it’s not uncommon for an Indian to speak 5-6 languages as a matter of course, either (another way that India puts the United States to shame).

India is all cultures at once, and yet quintessentially Indian. It absorbs cultures, absorbs religions, languages, art, and whole peoples like a sponge absorbs liquid, and yet, like a sponge, doesn’t really change as a result. It stubbornly, admirably, retains its own distinctive form and function. Wring all of those external influences out of it and there, still, is India, incredible India (as the motto goes), baking under a sweltering sun and deliquescing under torrential monsoons and bedazzling you with the sheer, titanic, interminable hammer-hammer-hammering of its colors, and chaos, and cacophony. It can be exhausting, to say the least.

But today is not about making sense of India. Better men than me have tried. No, today is about trying to make sense out of something even more crazy and unbelievable than India: the insanity of product packaging.

Tough Times

There are many hard things about living in Shanghai.  These, however, are not two of those things.

My first pedicure in Shanghai.  Electric blue.

OMG.  It's a dumpling.  Then they fry it.  Until it carmalizes on the bottom.  And cover it with toasted sesame seeds.  It does spew boiling hot pork juice on you when you bite into it.  But whatever, there's ointment for that.

First day of school pics coming soon...

Walking in the Neighborhood

I thought some of you might be sick of pictures of my children.  Instead, here are some pics of my walk through the neighborhood this morning on my way home from taking Eli to school.  It is downright cool out -- in the 70s.  Heavenly.


Every morning, there are 3-4 women chopping the crap out of giant bags of vegetables.  Here's the aftermath. 

The End of Summer Vacation

I've always found the last week before school starts is filled with random activities.  Maybe eating that last Dairy Queen sundae (don't tell Matthew and Eli that we did this), watching a jazz concert on a hot summer's night, buying a new electronic keyboard, shopping for pig shaped red bean buns, or really just killing time before the structure of school starts.  So, here are some random photos from the last few weeks:

Eli made a self portrait at school. 

Typhoon Days and Inflatables

There's humid.  And then there's the humid that comes from 36 hours of typhoon.  Whoa.  Let's just say that it takes several hair ties to control Townes' hair in this weather.

School and work were closed for two days due to Typhoon Haikui.  Totally understood why we needed to stay inside on Wednesday.  It was just ridiculous out.  Thursday was actually fine, but we enjoyed some more quality time together nonetheless.  Really.

There were lots of tree limbs down, signs blown over, giant pieces of metal clanging loosely from the 26th floor of the building down the street (yikes), but overall things look good in the neighborhood.

Bamboo down.

Oops.

Marriage and The Wrath of God

Is there any other kind?

In China, there’s no such thing as a joint bank account. Allison and I can’t have an account we share, and we can’t have an account with more than one debit or credit card attached to it. For practical purposes, this means we have one bank account in my name (since I’m drawing more income presently) – and one banking card, that we end up having to pass back and forth to each other all the time. It’s a minor inconvenience but a nagging one, since the solution seems so obvious – let us merge our finances, just as we’ve done comfortably for the last 15 years.

Chinese law and banking practice seem designed to keep people separate, individual, divided, at least from a fiscal standpoint. Since the country has a communist political system, this is counterintuitive. If the political ideal is that everyone owns everything equally, then everything is shared by everybody already. After all, you don’t own land in China, or houses, or apartments, you just buy the use of them for 99 years or so. Nobody knows quite what happens after that, but the principle is clear: everything ultimately belongs to the people (as embodied by the State), not to any individual person.

So why not extend that principle to married couples? Why can’t they share their money and assets – a kind of subset of “the people,” if you will?

Good Times in Vermont

Actually, our trip started with a short but wonderful stop over in Chicago.  We got a quick blast of the DeGroots, Ludens, Harpers, and Wolynias.

Eli and his partner in crime/cousin Desmond.

We made it to Vermont.  All of the clean, fresh air had a strange effect on us.



A great spot to recover from jet lag.

You Know You Had a Great Vacation When...

...you don't find the time to blog, facebook, take photos, or do anything other than relax and spend time with all your favorite people!  I will try to post some of the few photos we took later.

We arrived back in Shanghai yesterday after a pretty uneventful trip.  The only mess up was that we left Eli's very favorite stuffed animal (his lambchop puppet named Babydoll) and very special blanket in the hotel in Newark.  After a few frantic phone calls to the hotel, Babydoll and Blue Blanket were located and will be sent to Grandma and Grandpa who will ship them to us in Shanghai.  Eli has asked about them MANY times, but he seems ok with the explanation that they are going on an extra adventure and will be here soon.  Thank you staff at Newark Airport Marriott for saving the day!

Shanghai is gorgeous today.  Warm and humid, but blue skies and oddly, clean and fresh air.  We've been awake since just before 6 a.m.  Not bad.  Here's hoping the weather stays so nice and we continue to sleep normally.  We left Matthew at the Shanghai airport so he could head off to Bangkok for a few days.  Hopefully we'll all be over our jet lag by the time he gets home. 

We miss all of our Vermont friends and family already, but we are excited for the next part of our adventure.  Ok, there are varying levels of excitement but at least a bit of excitement in all of us.

I’ve Got A Golden Ticket



Matthew and Allison on a rare date (thanks Elaine!),
eating the best Vietnamese food I've ever had.

That’s the metaphor for today. Shanghai is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. You can get lost in it, wander around stumbling across amazing places, and never see the same thing twice. The proprietor’s motives and personality are uncertain, and seem composed of equal parts frenzy, creativity, callousness and unpredictability. The metro is the glass elevator.

One day it’s a room with a hundred trained squirrels shelling walnuts, the next it’s dragon boat races and crowds tossing leaf-wrapped rice dumplings into the water. Down this hall there’s a passel of Mormons homeschooling their kids in the park; down that chute, a lady selling a thousand crickets in little wicker baskets. Zig this way and you’re on the fastest train in the world. Zig that way and you’re in the middle of a giant kite flying festival.

You can sample gourmet Japanese sweets, dry-fried Sichuan green beans with peppercorns that numb your lips, German microbrews, glazed Chinese chicken feet, dumplings filled ingeniously with soup that spills down your chin when you bite into them, green tea flavored Oreos, abalone and sea horses, Indian dal and pickled mango as good as any you’d find in Delhi, sacks of bleeding yum berries and hairy lychee fruit, and the KFC spicy triple chicken burger.

You could spend years on the metro, exploring, and every time you came to the top of the escalator you’d find something different and new to explore. Could be the ocean, a farm, an IMAX theater, a back alley phantasmagorium, a wet market, an endless sea of identical apartment buildings, an underground flea market, a British soccer (sorry, football) pub, a factory making iPads, a wasteland of concrete rubble flecked randomly with tiny, well-ordered garden plots, an orphanage for kids with cleft palates, a trendy bar that used to be an early meeting place for Mao Zedong and the Communist party.

In a few days, we are heading back to Vermont for 3 weeks of rest and vacation and hanging with friends. It will be weird to slip out of this carnival freak show and back into the more measured, idyllic rhythm of summer in New England. Nice, great, but weird.

And we will come back here. If you read my last post, you might think that we are just miserable and crazy in Shangai, and on off days we may feel that way. But it’s fascinating too, and we are pushing our limits and finding that we are able, happily, to move beyond them. That’s a lesson worth learning, as even Naomi and Townes would tell you.

In Chinese, the United States is called ma guo, which means “beautiful land.” We are looking forward to getting back to it for a spell. See you there.

Hangzhou

This weekend was our first real family trip outside of Shanghai since we got here in March.  It wasn't far, only an hour on the bullet train, but it felt different from Shanghai.  And there were mountains!  And a lake!  And a small city of only 6 million!  Yes, that feels small now.

At Shanghai Honqiao train station. 

Ahh, Hangzhou.  Our hotel was on the edge of the city on a tea plantation.  Yes, that's tea.  Lots of tea.

After walking around, we stopped to eat.  And eat.  And eat.  It was delicious.

Last Week of School

AATY is not unlike other schools in that during the last week, not a lot of work gets done.  Instead we're doing this:

Some like to sleep on the subway, some like to sing.

Jing'an Temple.  And a shopping mall.

Notice the ballroom dancers behind them. 

Jing'an Park

We travelled 15 metro stops to find the best pancakes in Shanghai.  Well worth it.

Insects and Antiques

The big kids and I have been on a field trip roll this week.  Today, we checked out the Flower, Bird, Fish & Insect Market and then the Dongtai Lu Antique Market. Both were really awesome.  We can't wait to take all of you there for a visit.

There were kittens.

   

And silkworms.

And baby ducks.

And crickets.  Lots of crickets:

Then off to the antique market which was basically a couple of pedestrian streets with stalls of old junk/treasures, bicycle repairmen, men killing chickens on the sidewalk, and really cool knick-knacks.

Today is also the day that the Hunger Games finally opens in China.  Matthew and Naomi and Townes are at the theater right now watching it in 3D. 

And in other important news:

Eli got a bubble gun.

and Naomi's going to school.  A real brick and mortar school.  She's ditching AATY for Shanghai United International School starting September 1st.  Townes will likely go there too, but we're still negotiating the details with him.  He currently prefers AATY...

The Flip Side





Our local shoppping center has a huge display commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster.  Pictured here, they have unintentionally (I have to assume) and unironically included a full front-page parody page from The Onion about the event, alongside official news reports from the day from The New York Times and the Syracuse Herald.  I love this.




 “Are you a fucking jackass?” I asked Townes the other day. I think that may be the first time I’ve ever sworn at my nine-year-old. Certainly, without question, the first time I’ve ever done it with feeling. I went on to tell him that if he ever did it again, I’d spank him so hard he wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week (channeled my Dad pretty good on that one). I’ve also never spanked the kid.

Welcome to the other side of our life in Shanghai.

I have to say that on the whole, being here has been a lot harder than I expected it to be.

Children's Day

June 1st was Children's Day.  A day you are supposed to buy your kids a present and be extra nice to them and let them do whatever they want.  Really?  Yes, really.  Luckily for us, Eli's school had a big celebration, and I hardly had to be extra nice at all.

Teacher Michael and Teacher Mimi (yes, that's what they call them) explaining the activities.

There was a ring toss game.

A hoop race.  That's the beloved Teacher Viviana on the left.

Eli and I doing the three-legged race.

A sack race.  Naomi and Townes were great cheerleaders.

You get the idea.  Then there was a huge, catered outdoor buffet (which led to some discussions with the kids about the difference in style between public schools and private schools...).

Every kid got a big a$$ balloon. 

Did I mention the desserts?

And best of all...a bouncy house!