The Great Wall

Hiking the Great Wall of China with my girls and my parents was an unbelievable experience- dream like. While hiking around, Susan Grace and I found an "off the beaten trail" path. We decided to take it and we ended up between two sections of the wall, away from the crowds with incredible views. Wow. It was just unbelievable.

The Hutong Tour

My Chinese-speaking friend wrote down "The Hutong Tour" on her list of suggested places to see and do in Beijing. I asked the concierge what the Hutong tour included and he said, in a thick Chinese accent, "rickshaw ride to farmland homes". Wow, that sounds really cool, I thought, envisioning myself riding a rickshaw through picturesque fields of rice. (A rickshaw is a buggy pulled by a bicycle instead of a horse.)
I've been wanting to ride in a rickshaw and it turned out to be a simply delightful experience, especially when my partner, Anna turned to me and said, "I love you, Mom".
We took a tour down to the center of Beijing, into the heart of one of the oldest parts of the city called the Hutong (narrow streets). We had a tour guide that gave us valuable insight and understanding about how the city changed under the rule of Mao. The tour was going along nicely, until she said, "We will now leave the rickshaws here and visit a family home." My emotion quickly changed from "simply delighted" to "awkwardly apprehensive". The thoughts of going into the home of a perfect stranger in the "slums" of inner city Beijing made me nervous. I also felt confused. I almost blurted out, "What about the rice paddies?". Straining to compose myself, I wandered obediently around a back corridor and into someone's small ramshackle home. I felt just like a missionary. I looked at my parents and my girls and said, "Well, now we know what it would be like to serve a mission together". In this man's home he talked to us about daily life in China and what it is like to be Chinese (with the help of our tour guide interpreter). It was very interesting and a bit surreal sitting there chatting with this man while we munched on sunflower seeds and peanuts and feebly sipped the Coke-a-cola (a drink that was given to us as a desperate alternative to our polite yet emphatic refusal to drink the tea that they offered beforehand). Our visit with this young man in his home was a very unique experience and in the end enjoyable but I still couldn't figure out what had happened to the farmland part of the tour. Then it dawned on me that it was the Chinese accent, "farmland" was "family".
The tour ended with a loud and impressive drum ceremony at the top of a 69 stair climb up the "stairs of longevity" in the Drum Tower of Beijing.
After the tour we were hungry, hungry enough to bicker about where to eat. True to our American roots, we ended up in McDonalds. I can't believe I ate at McDonalds in China.

The Forbidden City

While my parents where here visiting us we did something adventurous and brave: we traveled to the city of Beijing with me as tour guide. My neighbor from Taiwan prepared me for the trip by writing down (in Chinese and English) some of the "must sees" in Beijing and scheduled a driver to take us to The Great Wall. I didn't realize how valuable her translations would be until I was there in a big and very foreign city.
Because we were six people (Mom, Dad, Me, Susan-Grace, Miriam, and Anna) we had to take two cabs. This proved to be a challenge when on our first day out, the driver of my parent's cab dropped them at the south gate of the Forbidden City and the driver of my cab dropped me at the north gate. Ooops. We waited at the south gate for a while wondering where they could possibly be? Then I began to see that considering the size of the Forbidden City and the crowds that day, we were most likely separated for good. We would have to get back together later on.
Anna, Susan-Grace and I went into the Forbidden City still hoping that we would find them inside. At one point, I put Anna on my shoulders to see if she could see anyone that looked like Nana, Papa and Miri. No luck. We finally gave up and enjoyed our site-seeing.
Gracie's eye for details made my trip inside the Fobidden City even more enlightening. She led us through a back pass off the beaten trail and we found ourselves in the quiet courtyard of the city's library. Afterwards, we walked through an impressive ceramics exhibit that gave me an appreciation for the beauty of ancient Chinese celedon (not to be confused with Korean celedon)

The More the Merrier

We had an Easter egg hunt at a nearby park and invited the children playing there to join in. For some of them, I think it may have been their first Easter egg hunt. Watching them study the brightly colored plastic eggs before popping them open was almost as entertaining as their suprised reaction to what was inside.

Clowing Around

James is my April Fool's baby. Every year I think really hard about a fun prank that will make him smile. I haven't been successful yet. This year, after everyone went to bed, Jim and I changed the Wii characters that the children had created for themselves. We made them really ugly and silly. The next day when my children turned on the Wii they were so confused. We all had a good laugh. But, James was not happy. Just yesterday he told me what a terrible idea that was. He said, "My Wii person will never be the same now, Mom. You ruined him."

Last year, we took eyeliner and colored Anna and Margaret's faces in the night. I was careful not to make a mustache on James because I didn't want him to be the joke, after all it was his birthday. It turns out, he was so sad that I didn't include him. Ooops.

The year before I sent his picture to school with some "tweeks". I didn't even get a smile out of him that year.

In spite of my failure to make him laugh, we had a great time celebrating his sixth birthday. My parents came to visit Korea on March 31st. The next day we celebrated all day with James. We went shopping, bowling, and out to eat on the U.S. army base thanks to my dad's military I.D. It was like a trip to America. So nice. It made up for the fact that James' favorite kid spot, Tiovivo turned up to be opsyo (a Korean word for "non- existent"). We drove all the way there to find out it had been turned into an English Training School for kids. April Fools! Not.

Thank goodness for Papa and his military I.D.

Happy Birthday, James. I love you.

The Kind and The Generous

One of the biggest challenges with our new school is the language barrier. To the credit of the teachers, their English is very good. It's my Korean that stinks. Everyday the children bring home their school notes and I toss them aside--there is really not much more I can do with them. Once a week Jim takes them into his work and has them translated by his T.A. But, by the time this is done, the information is obsolete and we are a day late with everything. True to their reputation, the Korea community has be kind, patient, and generous through it all.

The other day, James wanted to take juice for a snack. I didn't know if this was acceptable because the snack that is distributed to the class is milk. James doesn't like the milk, so I wrote a note to the teacher.

I wrote: "Can the children bring juice to school to drink?"

This was his teacher's response, "Thank you for saying so. I’m really grateful to you."

Hmmm. What to do? Should I send the juice, or not?

Anna's teacher is encouraging her to learn Korean. In a note that Anna wrote to the teacher, Anna said:

"Thank you for helping me with Korean"

Anna's teacher replied,

"And thank you that you say thank you to me."

That is so sweet-- Thank you, that you say thank you to me-- it makes me smile.

Get to work

I've been known to barrel headlong into life's experiences. It's not that I haven't given these decisions good thought and consideration, it's just that once I decide, I'm done. I'm in a hurry to move forward. My courtship with Jim for example: it was three weeks from first date to engagement and three and one half months to marriage. Crazy.

Needless to say, I often get into these "headlong experiences" and think to myself, "I didn't know it was going to be like this."

That's what happened when I found out that there is no recess in the Korean elementary school. What? I was also a bit surprised when my daughter told me that the teacher hits the children with a ruler. What? Then I had to once again say, "What?" when I walked the children to their classes and the students were cleaning the school.

Every other Saturday is a special day

The other day I picked up James from school. His teacher looked at me and said, "Tomorrow, is holiday. No school." I had to think for a minute. Hmm. What was tomorrow? It's Saturday. I was confused. Then I remembered, the children have to go to school on Saturdays, every other Saturday to be precise. Tomorrow was their "day off". I smiled to myself and thought, "tomorrow is a holiday- how nice."

In Korea, children go to school on Saturday. It's a hard concept.

My Children in Thailand 2010

An Elephant's Viewpoint