Sunday bike ride

We took a break from our crazy schedules for a family bike ride yesterday. My favorite thing about living here is riding or running out into the mountains, through little villages and past temples and any green we can find. Bamboo, tea plants, forest. This time we explored a new direction and saw some interesting sights.

Riding through one village we saw a dead snake in the road. So of course we had to stop and take a picture:

Our best guess is that is a kid's play thing, dragged around the streets and alleys by the string tied on the tail end, posed in a particularly scary position and left in the road to scare visitors.

Later we came across this noodle shop making noodles and dumpling wrappers.

The large rolls on the machine on the right are sheets of dough, run through the machine multiple times to roll out the thin sheets. On the left you can see the long skinny noodles hanging to dry.

And right across the street was this bread cart:

I like to stop at one of these carts on my way to the market whenever I find one. It is a yeast dough rolled out and spread with sugar or salt/spicy paste.

Then the dough is stuck onto the inside of a metal drum with a fire underneath:


After it cooked you could see the print of the baker's hand:


We rode under the construction of a new highway that cuts right through some beautiful fields:

Temple on the left (yellow building) and new road on the right

And finally into the hills where we found lots of green:

Tea fields

Hope you all had a nice weekend!

Shanghai weekend

Last weekend we made what we thought was going to be our last trip to Shanghai. We were going to finalize our Argentine visas, pick up a friend visiting from the UK, enjoy some last big city food and shopping.

Long story short, despite dressing Milan in his Argentine football jersey, we did not get our visas. We are now scrambling to gather more paperwork in the next couple weeks and may end up going back. But the rest of the trip was successful (trying to look on the bright side).

Most importantly, Milan got to have non-dairy sorbet!

After an incident a few weeks ago where he told me he thought ice cream comes were made out of wood, I felt bad for this little dairy-allergic kid with no vegan ice cream choices here. So we made it a priority to find a gelato place. Unfortunately the cones were encrusted with nuts, but he was perfectly happy with strawberry sorbet in a cup.

On Saturday Milan and I visited the Shanghai Natural Wild Insect Kingdom, next to the Pearl Tower on the Pudong side. There were more than just cool bugs there. Also fun frog-shaped trash cans!

Milan wanted to take this picture of me with the trash can

There were many live bugs and dead bugs, reptiles, a fish pond, and even a mammal room in the basement where you could pet and feed guinea pigs, goats, and rabbits.

Milan explores the butterfly drawers

The most interesting exhibit in the museum was the display of a true bug that looks like a person's face. The Chinese descriptions at the museum were no help to me, but a quick Google search tells me this is Catacanthus, a species of stink bug from Asia. There was a whole wall showing individual bugs and their human doppelgangers.

You can see the resemblance, right?

Later that day we dragged our visitor, fresh off the airplane, to the insect market to round out the day of bugs.

Unlike my last visit there, most of the crickets were caged in these hand woven wicker baskets this time. I am guessing that maybe spring is the time to catch new crickets and they are transported in these baskets to the market. Each and every one of these baskets had a loud chirping cricket - you can imagine the racket in the place! We did not bring any of them home this time, but did purchase some cricket supplies for future wild caught New England and Argentine crickets and bugs.

Then we wandered through the neighborhood, Tim enjoyed watching a very intense Mah Jong game on this street:


The next morning we went to the Jing'an temple, a big beautiful and peaceful temple right in the middle of an upscale shopping district in Shanghai.


Thanks for a nice weekend, Shanghai, and thanks for reminding me why I love Beilun! Nothing like a weekend in the big city to make me happy to come home to our little town!

This little piggy went to Shanghai

We are on our way out the door for a weekend trip to Shanghai, but I just wanted to share a few pictures from the Fine Arts events today.

Milan was the first little piggy in the Three Little Pigs


His friend William was the Big Bag Wolf


And here is Milan's abstract art in the art show:


Have a great weekend!

Four weeks and counting

We only have four weeks left until we leave China. As you can probably imagine, things are getting busy, crazy and stressful as we prepare to get rid of all of our belongings except those we can carry in 9 suitcases on the airplane. Not to mention trying to arrange to see friends before we leave, eat as much good food as we can, go on some last bike rides in the countryside, and go to Shanghai to get our Argentine visas.

So this weekend was a busy one. Saturday was the school/neighborhood yard sale, where we sold everything we could live without for the next month. The apartment seems empty now, and I feel totally unorganized because I don't have our usual front door table where we keep keys, wallets, spare change and sunglasses. Milan did surprisingly well in the face of selling off a bunch of his toys. I was expecting major drama and tears at the sale, but luckily he was busy looking for snails and doodlebugs when the heavy yard sale traffic came through. Later, at home, he really got into the spirit and went around labeling everything that remains with 5RMB price tags. Including my dirty socks, the furniture that came with the apartment, and my favorite wall hanging. I guess that's only fair.

On Sunday we attended the International Family Game Day here in Beilun. We were invited by the neighborhood community center Yulan to be a part of their team in the competition. Actually, the sign at the event described it perfectly:


There were 4 funny games, to be exact. Each game designed for a family of three. Number one I like to call walking the plank:


Unfortunately I don't have pictures of us doing any of these amazing feats for obvious reasons, so you will have to use your imagination and picture the three of us strapped to two wooden boards shuffling down the stadium floor. We did not fall and hurt ourselves in this event, that was our main goal.

Number 2: the four-legged race.

We actually did okay on this one because Milan is small and light enough that he stood with one foot on Tim's foot and one on mine, so we were able to make it down the path carrying him between us.

Number 3 was a sack race and our friends on the team were very worried about Milan's ability to hop all the way across all by himself. Or maybe they were just worried about the team losing all chance of winning. He did it all by himself, but unfortunately we don't have any pictures because we were, well, stuffed in sacks waiting our turn to hop across the stadium for the relay race. I wish I had gotten a picture of his face because he was so proud of himself for doing it all by himself!

Number 4: Straws and rubber bands. This was the least physical and the most interesting. And by interesting I mean there were some really interesting poses of 200 people passing rubber bands to each other with straws in their mouths.


It was a really cute idea, with each team forming a long line across the stadium floor and passing rubber bands from one end of the line to the other. Milan was at the end of the line with Tim assisting and I was stuck in the middle somewhere.

It was fun for the first 4 or 5 rubber bands, but then I started to wonder, are we competing for the most rubber bands in a certain time period, or getting a certain number of rubber bands passed as fast as possible? These are the minor technicalities that are hard to work out when you hardly speak the language. Turns out it was number of rubber bands in about 45 minutes, or at least it felt like we were passing those stupid rubber bands for that long. It was probably closer to 10 mintues which was about 7 minutes too long.

And after all of this we were still smiling! It was really alot of fun and Milan did great! Judging by what he tried to recreate at home today, he loved the straw game and the sack race the most. And despite being the slowest in the rubber bands, the sack race, and probably the plank walk, somehow our team came in fourth place!

It was totally rigged. There is no way we came in fourth.

And Tim was interviewed by at least 4 reporters, one for national news!

We came, we played funny games, we had fun building harmony and teamwork with our family and community!


But really, the best part of the weekend was this:


My favorite berries, yáng méi Chinese red bayberries are back! I found the first of the season on Sunday and made this yáng méi -mulberry cobbler for dessert after dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant. I must eat as many yáng méi as possible in the next four weeks! I think I am up for that challenge.

Digging a tunnel from China

Tim found this cool website that shows you where you would end up if you dug a tunnel directly to the other side of the Earth from any point on the globe.

So if we start here in Beilun, China:


And dig directly to the other side, we would come out here:

In Argentina, outside a town called Curuzú Cuatiá, about 330 miles north (as the crow flies) of the neighborhood where we be living in Buenos Aires.

So, when we say we are moving to the other side of the world, we are being (almost) precisely accurate!

Try the website here - where will you end up?
http://www.livephysics.com/ptools/dig-hole-through-earth.php