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.