Everything but the kitchen sink

When you live in China, every time you go to the U.S. you stock up on things that are hard or expensive to get in China. This means mostly fairly mundane food items for most Americans. When a box of Cheerios costs US$10, the local oatmeal starts to look better. Anyway, a recent Hawaii trip was no exception. We went there with 2 suitcases of stuff and 7 empty suitcases nested inside each other.

After a big Costco trip (on everyone's Hawaiian tourist list - beach, luau, Costco), we showed up at the check-in counter with 9 bags, each maxed out on the 50 pound weight limit, 3 car seats and a bunch of carry-ons. It was obvious that people thought we were insane – did we each bring 100 swimsuits? One guy made a comment incorporating a reference to the kitchen sink. I had to fill him in on our living arrangements, which I think at 5:45am both clarified and confused things for the poor guy.

Movie review

I recently picked up this Jimmy Carter documentary at the local DVD store. Like most DVDs that are available for purchase here in China, the origin of this particular DVD is somewhat murky. The funny thing you see on a lot of these is that the basics of the DVD cover look fine, but if you really look at the text it often turns out to be pretty funny. This is a great case in point. You probably can't read it on the blog itself, but double-click on the second image to read the review of this movie. Either this is a fake DVD or Sony Pictures has to take a much better look at the quality of its marketing department.

Baby shower game/quiz

Jenny recently threw a baby shower for her friend Elizabeth. Besides the lame grunt work that is normally assigned to me on these occasions, I was tasked with coming up with a game. I wrote up a baby/child oriented quiz. A few questions have a some China-living specific elements, but most are pretty generic. The answers are fairly negotiable so we had a hard time determining a winner. I suggested a sudden-death playoff involving the decidedly un-PC sounding Indian leg wrestling that we used to do in Boy Scouts, but was voted down. Anyway, try your luck!

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Baby Shower quiz

1) What’s the best way to deal with labor pains?
A) Acupuncture
B) Well rehearsed breathing techniques
C) Holding your spouse’s hand and knowing his love can sustain you through this trial
D) Heavy doses of prescription pain killers injected directly into your spine

2) Which of the following are you more likely to buy with your first child than with your third?
A) Bottle sanitizer
B) Changing table
C) Diaper genie
D) All of the above

3) What can you never have enough of?
A) Money
B) Love
C) Peace of mind
D) Sippy cups

4) You drop a pacifier on the floor of a restaurant. Match the responses below
When the pacifier belongs to your:
a) 1st child
b) 2nd child
c) 3rd child
d) 4th child

then you will:
1) Rinse it off with some Diet Coke
2) Brush it off on your pants
3) Rinse it off with some water
4) Wash in soap and water then boil to sanitize

5) What goes well with ketchup?
A) Hot dogs
B) Hamburgers
C) Macaroni and cheese
D) Pasta
E) All of the above

6) The remote is lost. Where’s the most logical place to look for it?
A) Under the couch near the TV
B) In the toilet
C) In the garage mixed in with the bike helmets or garden tools
D) It doesn’t really matter since someone has probably pulled the batteries out anyway

7) Your spouse calls you at work to tell you that one of the kids has somehow gone to the bathroom on the computer keyboard. Your most likely response is:
A) “I’ll come right home and take care of it”.
B) “Just pour some sawdust on it and I’ll take care of it when I get home”.
C) Say “Hold on just a second” then go ask your boss if there is some special project that he needs done right away, then get back on the phone and say “I’d love to help but I’ve got a big deadline”.

8) Your cordless phone is missing. What probably happened to it?
A) It’s in the toilet
B) It’s in the toilet with the remote
C) It’s in the toilet with the remote and maybe some car keys

9) What’s a sure sign that your spouse isn’t pulling his/her weight?
A) When sudden and conveniently timed “conference calls” start popping up whenever there’s a particularly stinky diaper to change
B) When a husband tries to disrupt the natural order of things by suggesting that his wife should start taking out the trash.
C) When you suspect that you’re the only one who cares about cleaning the lint filter in the dryer.

10) What’s the biggest problem with pet bunnies?
A) The cute bunnies grow up into plain old rabbits
B) They eat all the plants in your backyard up to about 18 inches high
C) You feel guilty as they just sit there in that little cage looking at you with those rabbit eyes and those wiggly noses with a look that is basically the same always but you somehow know that this time it means they’re totally depressed and wondering about what they could have possibly done in a prior life to deserve this miserable existence
D) Once they grow up you can’t give them to your ayi to take home, skin and eat because if the kids ever got wind of it you’d be branded “The Rabbit Killer” for life.

11) What is the most difficult thing to find?
A) The lid to the only clean Tupperware left in the cupboard
B) Both of your three year old’s church shoes on Sunday morning five minutes after you were supposed to leave to be on time
C) Enough spaghetti sauce after you’ve already put the spaghetti in the water to boil
D) The remote, your cordless phone and maybe your car keys all at the same time

12) Your kids want to get some goldfish real bad. What’s the best response?
A) “OK, but fish are a big responsibility and you’ll have to take care of them”
B) “OK, but you’ve got to catch them with a mini-fishing pole in one of those little ponds in a Chinese park”
C) “No, you’ll get bored of them and overfeed them and we’ll end up with a murky green fish tank with nothing in it except for a fake mini-treasure chest and some water skeeters scooting around on top”
D) Don’t make a fuss and just let them get the fish, but know that they’ll end up in the toilet with the remote, the cordless phone and maybe some car keys.

13) You know that you’re getting old when:
A) You start thinking reading glasses might actually come in handy
B) Your child’s teacher was born when you were in high school
C) Your kids ask you if the extra skin under your neck has a special name
D) You look back nostalgically at Soap on a Rope

14) Circle who would win in a fight (for clarification, no knives, guns or bombs allowed even secret super infinity power bombs that could destroy the world a million zillion infinity times):

Transformer vs. GI Joe
GI Joe vs. Island Princess Barbie
Island Princess Barbie vs. My Pretty Pony
My Pretty Pony vs. Webkins
Webkins vs. Blackberry
Blackberry vs. iPod
iPod vs. Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates
Bill Gates vs. Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett vs. Jimmy Buffett
Jimmy Buffett vs. Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter vs. Jimmy Dean Lil’ Smokies Mini-sausages
Jimmy Dean Lil’ Smokies Mini-sausages vs. Trans-fat Free Cheetos
Trans-fat Free Cheetos vs. Transformer

15) Why is it called a baby shower anyway?
A) I really have no idea
B) Because you shower the future mom with gifts and love
C) Because the first one ever held was during caveman times and they had no chairs and they sat around in the mud talking about babies so naturally they got dirty and towards the end one of them said “Man, after all this sitting in the mud and talking about babies I could really use a shower even though its not invented yet” and another said, “Yeah, me too, but first we’ve got to invent a shower curtain or we’ll get water all over the floor”

Spooky soap

This is a lame post, but I've always found this sort of funny. Whitecat is a popular Chinese brand of dishwashing soap. I think the cat in the picture just looks weird - maybe a little spooky or haunted or something. Would you trust that cat to get your dishes clean? Can you imagine someone in the US buying dishwashing soap with a picture of a creepy cat that looks like it could have come off of a santeria candle?

New Beijing Airport

Beijing opened its new airport a couple of months ago. Its a beautiful building that is purportedly the largest terminal in the world. Huge high ceilings, lots of marble and glass. Its sort of like the Hong Kong airport, but the shopping isn't as varied and restaurants are almost all Chinese, which isn't a surprise. The Chinese are good at big public buildings.

Dora in Chinese

Ethan is a big Dora the Explorer fan, but he watches it on Chinese DVDs. Its actually a version that's translated into Chinese, so imagine all the Spanish words in U.S. version of Dora being translated into English and all the normal English speech translated into Chinese. Some of the character names are still in English, Dora and Boots, for example, but others such as Map are translated into Chinese.

Ethan actually understands quite a bit of Chinese. There are some basic food words, like eggs or apples, which I'm not sure if he knows in English are not, since usually asked for these things in Chinese. we have a made here and she only speaks Chinese. She'll tell Ethan to go put his shoes on or pick up a toy and he'll go and do it, so he understands more Chinese than he speaks.

Asleep at the wheel

A lot of people in China take naps at their desks at lunch time. They just fold there arms and zonk out for a while. I'm not sure how they figure out when to wake up at the end of lunch. You see it all over the place.

This has got to be the best I've seen though. This picture is of a booth at a trade show I spoke at this past weekend. That's what I call putting your best foot forward from a corporate point of view. If you had questions, I'm not sure if you'd wake him up or just leave a business card. I'd be most concerned that people might just help themselves to a couple extra free pens.

Badminton is not a crime!

I took this picture in a small park across from my office. When was the last time you saw a “No Badminton” sign in a U.S. park? Those badmintoners always were a troublesome lot.

Letter to an Old Man

When you start getting letters like this, you know you're getting old.

The Annals of Irresponsible Parenting

When you think "zipline" you don't usually think "safe". If you add the adjective "Chinese" before "zipline" any sensible person will definitely think "dangerous". But you can say that about most things in China. If the Chinese had big station wagons you'd certainly see kids in the "way back", though I guess there wouldn't be many of them with the one-child policy. Danger aside, Abby and I went on this zipline over the bamboo forest. It was probably a couple of hundred feet off the ground when we were over the valley floor. Surprisingly, Abby was the instigator. It actually looked a bit safer than one we saw in a brochure here in Maui this week. It had a double connection to the zipline itself. Needless to say, there were no release forms or waivers to sign.

Fresh off that success, we found a smaller one over a small river at another place we visited and everyone went on it except myself and the baby - that's cautiousness for you. Ethan thought it was the greatest thing ever (he went on Jenny's lap).

Chinese bamboo industry

Here are some more pics of the area near the bamboo forest. They harvest the long shoots to use in everything from scaffolding to flooring to chopsticks. They dry in out on racks or in these haystack looking arrangements. They haul the raw bamboo on these really long flatbed trucks.

$2 Haircut

Here's Ethan getting a haircut at the local $2 barbershop. They are thrilled to have a little guy with platinum blond hair wander in. Ethan was okay for a while, but started getting bored and wiggly toward the end. He had a couple of people dancing around him making funny faces toward the end.

Treasure Island

The kids and I have been reading Treasure Island recently at bedtime. I hadn't read this book in years and years, but it's still a great tale. It's got it all -- treasure maps, sailing ships, buried treasure and plenty of semi-scurvy double-crossing pirates. The kids thought that Pew, the blind, mean and scary pirate who was posing as a beggar at the start, was particularly spooky. They were pretty disappointed when Long John Silver turned out to be something much worse than a cheerful ships cook as well. I'm just happy that they now know that Long John Silver is something more than a third tier fast food chain in the United States.

Bamboo Forest near Anji

This past weekend we went to a bamboo forest about 3 hours outside of Shanghai near a city called Anji. We got up really early so the kids would be sleeping part of the way, which only sort of worked. They filmed part of a famous kung fu movie named "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" here. It was a very beautiful place. The hillsides are covered solely with giant bamboo - a true bamboo forest. Bamboo as far as the eye can see, occasionally broken up by terraces where they are growing tea. We hiked up a fairly big hill and came down on an alpine slide they had built through the bamboo. That was a huge hit with the kids.

At the Shanghai Zoo

A couple of weeks ago I took the three oldest kids to the zoo in the Hongqiao neighborhood of Shanghai. It was a cool overcast day but not too cold. The zoo is really nice in that it’s a giant park with lots of green space. There were a number of cherry trees blooming which was fantastic. We saw some snakes, zebras, pandas, red pandas, monkeys etc. Pandas are pretty rare outside of China so that was fun for the kids. There are three of them at the Shanghai Zoo. Chinese zoos are funny in that they are a lot looser on the “don’t feed the animals” culture. The signs are there but people tend to ignore them. At the giraffe pen a lady climbed over the fence so she could feed an obliging giraffe some potato chips (see picture). Here's also a picture of one of the many photos the kids are asked to pose in. Ethan, in particular, with his big smile and light blond hair, was better than any giraffe or zebra for many of the people at the zoo.

It was a big place so the kids were pretty tired, but not tired enough to forget that I’d promised them that they could go on the ferris wheel. We had to walk back to get to it. It was big, fully enclosed capsules, sort of like a dingier version of the one at Luna Park in Sydney. After that, we bought some Wall’s ice creams and headed to the car. Jenny had gone with Zach to do some shopping.