Brazil

Here are some pictures from a cloudy day we spent at the beach near Sao Paulo while we were visiting my parents. Oh, and plus a picture of a python skeleton - a highlight on everyone's Brazilian itinerary.

Suspension bridge

This place is in North Vancouver, over a deep, but narrow gorge over a river.  A very pretty place, but it freaks some people out.  Here’s a picture of Jenny and Natalie. 

British school

The kids recently started school here in Shanghai at a British school called Dulwich College. Its a branch of a British school. The kids are each assigned to one of four "houses" that compete against each other in different contexts, which they think gives a Harry Potter-ish feel to the setup. Anyway, the uniforms are a bit different than the Batman shirts that they might be wearing in the U.S.

Promotion

Here's a spelling error that you wouldn't see at home.

A Hot Liver trustworthiness

I recently bought some prescription eyeglasses at an enormous eyeglass mall by the main train station here in Shanghai. It was a big building, about four stories high and every floor had probably 20 different glasses shops on it. If you want eyeglasses, this place is definitely the place to go and its very cheap. I ended up buying some glasses at a store and they gave me an English business card that they had proudly printed. Just yesterday, I was flipping through some papers and came across the card and noticed the text on the back for the first time, which you can see below. This is probably the roughest translation I've seen since I've been here. I don't know about you, but I generally don't associate Hot Liver trustworthiness with anything as mundane as eyeglasses.

Listerizing

Here's a room in a hotel where you can go to listerize or perhaps its where the staff does the requisite listerization or maybe instead its where the listerization equipment is stored.

What is listerization you might ask? Good question.

Chinese room service

Here's a room service menu from a hotel I stayed at recently in a 3rd tier city called Rizhao in Shandong province (on the coast between Beijing and Shanghai) where I was speaking at a conference. Click on the image to see it better.

How I got on the bill in this place is sort of a mystery to me. I asked someone at the hotel if they got foreigners very often. They said they'd had a German there about 2 years ago. Anyway, the room service reflected this fact.

Jellyfish with vinegar or pig's ear with chili oil. Tough call.

Very fresh chicken

There is a guy who sells fresh chicken about a block and a half from our house on weekends. He pulls up with is scooter which has a cage full of live chickens in it and also has some live ducks. The ducks aren't in the cage usually, but instead just sort of sitting on the ground next to the scooter. He must either clip the wings or perhaps they are smarter than chickens and are just sitting their depressed, contemplating their impeding doom.

This is very fresh stuff. You pick the chicken and he does all the dirty work right there on the street. You can see that its messy business. Tough way to make a living. Tougher on the chickens I suppose.

Jiu Hua Shan pics

This was the next stop on our road trip. This place is basically totally off the foreign tourist map, but it was a very cool place. Its one of the more famous Buddhist stops in China - monasteries carved into the side of high misty mountains, chanting saffron robed monks, lots of incense and gongs. Very atmospheric stuff. Anyway, this was another cable car place since our little band wasn't hearty enough for the 5 hour hike up. This place could have actually been crazier than Huangshan in terms of steep stairs and long fall possibilities, but the kids liked the incense stores and the hiking around. They also couldn't stay away from the souvenier stands. Ethan wanted a wooden sword like you wouldn't believe, but it would have been a disaster walking around the paths, let alone during the car ride home.

The people, as usual, were fascinated by the blondness and smallness of our crew. We were with one other family which upped the numbers of small blond people. Once you get out of Shanghai, Beijing and maybe Shenzhen and Guangzhou, your chances of seeing a foreign kid in real life are pretty slim so you get used to your kids being followed by a cellphone camera paparazzi.

Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) pics

We went on our first Chinese road trip over the recent October holiday (which is sort of the Chinese 4th of July). We drove about 6 hours to a place called Huangshan. This is a very famous tourist destination for Chinese. Many a contemplative Chinese poem has been written about the place over the centuries. Its a mountainous place that sort of reminds me of Yosemite. Lots of exposed granite. Anyway, unlike Yosemite, you can take a cable car to the top of different sections of the park. It was sort of a crazy place to take little kids since the paths are very narrow and carved into fairly steep cliffs so someone small and wiggly could be in trouble, but we made it and they loved it.

Painted face

I've been sort of slacking on posts lately. I'll catch up a bit.

Here's a pic from a funny painting gone awry day recently.

Copenhagen

I went to Copenhagen a few weeks ago for a customer meeting. It was beautiful Northern European summer weather - long days, warm days and cool nights. Anyway, I'd been to Copenhagen before a few times and I was only there for about 36 hours, but it was nice as jet-laggy intercontinental business trips go. We had dinner in Tivoli Gardens, which was very pretty at night. On the way back to Shanghai I had an 8 hour layover in Helsinki. I went into the city for about 4 hours. It was ok, but there wasn't anything particularly attractive from a tourist point of view asides from a few art museums. No offense to the vast Finnish readership of this blog.

More Beijing Olypmics pics

Here are a few more pics from the Olympics in Beijing. Look how blue the sky is! When do you ever see that in Beijing...

Beijing Olympics pics

We made it to the Olympics. I'll fill in a bit more later, but here are a few pics from today. We went to track & field in the Bird's Nest and it was fantastic. We were sort of a tourist attraction in our own right for many a Chinese tourist who took pictures with our kids.

Here today, gone to...

We went to Hawaii a while back - Maui specifically. This is a lazy posting, just pictures, but well suited for Grandparent edification purposes.