Thursday, May 31

All was peaceful, quiet and Montessori-like at the QAIS Children’s House this morning—the children were notably in the groove—when hysteria broke out.  The cause:  McDull was dozing on the reading couch, so the aide came over to rouse him, and she realized that he had a fever.  The nurse was brought in to take his temperature, and, having established that it was high, she started the hysterical reaction.  

Her diagnosis:  hand and mouth disease, feared as HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS in China.  The children were hustled straight out of the two rooms that compose our classroom, everyone was required to wash hands, and then we were sent outside for the next 1 ½ hours while the classrooms were disinfected.  It was breathtaking!  And when the mother called in to say that it didn’t appear to be hand and mouth disease, the nurse discounted that remark!  I was told 3 times of the incident that occurred last year, which necessitated the school shutting down.  I am unable to gauge the true level of the emergency here.  We were lucky that it was a beautiful morning, and the children were delighted to have a full hour of playground play.  So, frankly, were the teachers!  So no harm no foul—unless we all come down with hand and mouth disease!  (footnote:  the child is the one whose mother owns the Japanese bakery!  So, will we catch it from the child or from eating baked goods from the bakery? Keep your fingers crossed).

These are the tasty muffins we bought yesterday!

Meanwhile, Julia’s class took a field trip to a ‘western style’ restaurant, to act as restaurant critics surveying the health qualities of the food—a topic right up the Thomas family’s alley!  Field trips are always fun, even though the food she had pre-chosen turned out to be not much like the menu photos and not to her liking.  It was interesting, in fact, to hear her explain the ways the restaurant didn’t measure up to its own billing; signs of maturing even if disillusioned!

Today was art class; she did say out loud that art class is her favorite.  They’ve been making objects from clay, which has obvious satisfactions.  Will these products come home?  Stay tuned!  We must look into the process of mailing some of our stuff home—will that be economical and reasonably speedy?  Our traffic weighed out at the limit of permitted weight, and we hope to be bringing some things home with us.  Another option is to buy another suitcase; apparently we can each have two.

I got paid today:  I totally forgot that there was money making happening with this adventure.  I am currently carrying around a several inch thick stack of RMB, or yuan.  Feels good!  I realize now that I have been penny wise and pound foolish in the last month.  Not that I was harmed by it, although I could have made some ‘cheap’ decisions!  Luckily, that’s not my personality!  I have been buying the cheapest tissue paper—maybe I’ll spring for a better quality!  And I will stop feeling any guilt about Nutella or about chocolate in general.  I won’t hesitate to get another beer the next time we eat out!  And I am going right back to Uniqlo for that adorable shirt!  So much for money-making! 

My first expansive decision was to plan to take a taxi home from the buffet restaurant tonight—and what a good decision! Because we came home at about 7 pm, there wasn’t much traffic so the ride was quick, and we saved ourselves a 15 minute walk from the restaurant to the bus stop.  All told, a 22 yuan success.

The restaurant was as good today as on Sunday.  The best thing Julia had:  mango ice cream (also the first thing she ate, as she went straight to the desserts).  The best thing I ate:  seafood balls in tomato sauce.  It was the sauce that was so tasty.  I worked very hard on this trip to take only small servings of anything I tried, so as not to waste it and not to get filled up on one thing before I could try others.  Nonetheless, I went back for a second helping of Seafood balls! 

Julia with some mango sorbet to start off her meal!

Julia ate sushi! And dragon fruit, besides two kinds of ice cream, watermelon, pizza, French bread, and dumplings (but unfortunately not the kind she liked so much on Sunday).  I had Japanese style seaweed salad, the second best thing I ate, shrimp, a shrimp salad, steamed buns and dumplings, a good roll, some pasta with cream sauce, sushi, and some Asian soup with fresh noodles, broth and veggies.  It’s quite a place, with free beer! And children under 130 cm free.  And, I had a coupon.  What a deal.  Plus mango sorbet and boysenberry ice cream—they were delicious!  No walnut tarts today, unfortunately.  It was a different menu today, which is probably a good thing.  One wouldn’t want to serve the same things every day.

Here are some of those foods:

Julia's dumplings

Mama's seaweed salad

All of Julia's fruits!

A happy girl enjoying some sushi!

We arrived at the restaurant at 5:25 pm, 5 minutes early.  We got a table nonetheless, and went over to the ice cream counter where a mid 30s Caucasian man was getting things ready.  We ordered mango sorbet for Julia, and he asked us a few questions of the who, what, where variety.  When I asked for a spoon, he said, “I will organize a spoon for you; I’ll bring it over.”  How kind of the ice cream man!  I wandered among the counters, where the ice cream man found me a few minutes later, and struck up another conversation.  Turns out he too has just arrived, 2 ½ weeks ago.  I asked what brought him here: he said 1. A love of all things Asian, and 2. A job.  That kind of surprised me—scooping ice cream and dispensing desserts can bring you to China?  More conversation, and then he said, “I will give you my card, and you can contact me with your observations.”  I laughed!  The last time I was accosted by a stranger was in the vegetable section of Carrefour; she too, you might remember, asked for contact information.  I was about to file this new card away when I noticed (without my reading glasses) his job title:  Executive Chef.  I had been chatting up and being close to patronizing to the Executive Chef of the Intercontinental Hotel restaurant!  What a hoot! 

Here is Julia trying out the couch in the lobby by the restaurant

We took one of our regular walks/scoots along the ocean today, too, including a chance for Julia to try out one of the funny wheeled "cars." Here are a whole set of photographs from the walk:

Chinese Maggie and I had a chat about population this morning.  She noted that her fine for having a second child would be 160,000 yuan, or about $28, 000.  We discussed the law and its impact on the Han ‘tribe.’  The Han tribe makes up 90 % of the population—more than I had realized.  So while everyone can cite rules that make exceptions for various groups, the fact is that the basic rule applies to an overwhelming percentage of people.  When Han families have more than one child, they either pay the fine or have the child out of country (Hong Kong is a popular destination).  Maggie talked a bit about the cultural habits that result in favoritism to boys; she noted that the culture as a whole has always been a farming culture, for which males were the most useful kind of child.  That initial preference then hardened into an emotion-based preference.  That preference still prevails to a certain extent in rural climes.  I spoke about the very visible evidence of girls in Qingdao; she noted that city dwellers ‘don’t care.’  She said the rural population (meaning, not urban) makes up about 70% of the population.  So, it’s a complex situation!  News from the front. 

Maggie also talked about the atmosphere in Qingdao—a friendly, pleasant, cultural city.  She attributed this to the fact that of the two main philosophical forces in China’s history, Mao and Confucius, both of these figures were born in this area, the Shandong Province.  She would assert that the effect of these philosophies still shapes the community attitude in Qingdao.  Fascinating to think that these two major figures would come from the same area, given the size of the country!  I would certainly corroborate that Qingdao is a ‘nice’ place, and that this niceness seems to be deeply part of its character. 

As we rode home in the taxi—what a great idea once in a while!—we drove under our landmark overpass (with the pink petunias) and discovered that at night it is all lit up!  There are ‘christmas lights’ along each branch of the spider web, and they change colors, from red to blue to green to purple-pink.  The color is different on each branch at any time. The whole effect is delightful!

Wednesday, May 30

A silly Julia getting ready for school this morning

Many mornings start out with races! (The little girl  is the birthday girl from last week)

Julia and Alex love to race!

I discussed the idea of a ‘field trip’ for the 3s and 4s with Maggie—we will take a walk from the school to the beach (about 15 minutes along the boardwalk), play in the sand, have a snack, and walk back in time for lunch.  Maggie proposed that the school bus take and pick up the children, as Chinese children aren’t big on walking!!  She also suggested that we might do it twice in the month of June; woo woo! That will be a nice way to pass a pretty summer day.

As we passed a restaurant this morning, in the school van, Maggie mentioned that her family had eaten there recently.  I mulled that over all morning and decided that it counted as a health check/restaurant review.  So Maggie provided me with a written order—dumplings, rice, steamed vegetable, beer, and Sprite—and the Chinese and pinyin of the restaurant name and street name.  And we were off!

Alex and Maggie on the school van

First, after school, the van dropped us in front of Carrefour, and Maggie pointed out the Japanese bakery run by the mother of a student in my class.  We popped right in there to see if there was any good bread to be had.  It was primarily a cheesecake bakery! With the dearest little 6 inch birthday cake that we pre-ordered to pick up next week for Julia to take to a class celebration.  The mother came out from the kitchen and recognized me, which was kind, took our order, sold us yummy chocolate chip muffins, and gave Julia two butter/nut cookies in sweet little envelopes as a treat.  What a great discovery right in our shopping circuit; we will return for sure.  We had received a treat of rolls, on Tuesday, from another Japanese bakery about which we have heard tons of praise; they fully lived up to our expectations—crusty, full of raisins, and/or chocolate chips; yummy.  But apparently this bakery is far away and hard to get to.  So we will appreciate the gift and stop in at McDull’s mother’s cake bakery for butter cookies and slices of chocolate chip cheesecake—not a bad trade!

We walked all over Carrefour looking for the tortillas we had been told were available there—none to be found.  We managed to forget to get oatmeal, in the meantime, so don’t know what breakfast will be (oh, yeah, muffins!!).  Maybe we can stop at RT Mart tomorrow!  We failed on the Nutella as well, and may have to buy it at the expensive grocery store.  However, notice that at Carrefour, one can buy Pea Popsicles!  Not one but two varieties!

Aren't these funny, to American eyes?

These seem to be  pea-flavored creamsicles!

While Carrefour has been described as crowded and noisy, I enjoy it.  It is bustling, and the fish section is enough to put me off food for a week, but it feels real and it puts us right in the middle of regular life.  One helpful thing has been that grasping the money is very easy.  I can generally identify the cost of something, all the cash registers are electronic, and the total is in a ‘language’ that I understand and can compute.  Even at my neighborhood vegetable stand, the saleswoman has a calculator and she simply shows me the total.  While she doesn’t post prices and could be ripping me off daily, the prices are in a range that I don’t mind paying, so we are both happy with whatever the arrangement is.

We walked from Carrefour to the restaurant, about 4 blocks in the beautiful early evening.  If I had known it was going to be so clear, I might have planned to go up the Tower—I love the idea of a great view!  There were more enormous tankers in the bay this afternoon, including two which docked right over by the lighthouse.  The water was choppy, and the tide more apparent today—the sea is such an alive thing.

Here are some images from our walk:

I knew I had a 50/50 chance that I had remembered the right spot for the restaurant.  As we approached spot 1, I got out my slip of paper and asked the small crowd of waiters by the door if I was at the right spot.  Eager as they were for customers (it was early, at 5:30), they took the high road and pointed me up the street to the correct address—I was impressed.  We had a brief moment of tension at the restaurant when, having taken my written order slip, the waitress tried to explain to me something about the dumplings.  While I felt confident to say ‘whatever; just bring out the other thing’ the waitress could not go forward without making it perfectly clear what she couldn’t do.  So I took the easy route and called Maggie, as she had urged me to do if needed, and Maggie and the waitress figured out the best order (one kind of dumpling substituted for another). 

We found the restaurant!

Julia is happily awaiting some dinner, with the requisite pot full of tea already delivered

We felt really in the middle of an adventure, since we weren’t sure what would happen next—was being in a restaurant in China going to coincide with procedures in American restaurants?  We were brought a pot of tea right away, and tea was poured into the china cups on the table on a white plate; there were also black chopsticks.  The tea was green, I believe; a bit sharp but tasty.  Our Sprite and beer arrived—Tsingdao beer for me—room temperature; neither of us complained.  Then a big plate of snow peas came; glistening in who knows what—a bit of oil, and perhaps some broth.  They were crunchy and tasty in a simple way, just what the vegan needed.  Next, a huge plate of dumplings was put down—I’ll bet there were 25-30!  Julia did her best to master chopsticks to eat these slippery things with—it was a struggle, compounded by her left-handness.  We asked for some soy sauce and got a dish of medium brown sauce that had a vinegar flavor to it (part of the northern cooking style) which didn’t particularly appeal to Julia. 

Our tasty dumplings and crisp snap peas

A very satisfied dumpling eater!

Julia had relative success manipulating the chopsticks

There was a placard on the table, where the waitress attached some slips of paper; these turned out to be what we had ordered.  As each item arrived, it was checked off of the slips.  There were a lot of waiters/waitresses around, but the atmosphere had more of a feel of a buffet, with the wait staff doing the monitoring.  While it looked like a formal restaurant, the food was not presented with any special flourish.  The rice came last, after we had finished everything else; I don’t know if that was typical or if it had slipped by the monitoring.  There wasn’t really any formal conclusion to the meal—again, this may be in part the way we ordered.

These are the slips which recorded our food items

A view of the rest of the restaurant and some of the yellow-uniformed waitstaff

A smiling waitress in her uniform

Julia ate about 5 dumplings, which left a good 20 to mama.  They were very good; handmade, fresh, lightly boiled.  So I devoured the peas and dumplings, and Julia ate the classic bowl of white sticky rice.  As we ate, we ogled the food coming to the rapidly filling tables around us—lots of small shellfish, plates of noodles with vegetables, thin sliced meats, bright orange something or other!  There were a number of large tables, and they were receiving 6 and 8 dishes each, with bottles or pitchers of beer.  I think I would have eaten a lot of what I saw, if I had known how to order it.  My only limitation would be ‘too spicy.’   I hope we can try again, with a varied order.  The aides told me of two other dumpling places to try, one right next to our community gate, and the other a good ‘fish dumpling’ restaurant. 

We headed up the street, a new route for us, in the direction of the main road where we ride the bus regularly.  The street turned out to be something of a restaurant row; most of the shops we passed were food shops.  While there were many regular restaurants, there were also a lot of on-the-street cooking and eating places that are permanent but pretty darn basic!  I took a number of photos of the food displayed for grilling—lots and lots of fish, some of it still alive!  The set-up is pretty primitive, although as you can see here, there is an effort at sanitariness.  This huge urn is an oven—I peeked inside, and kabobs lined the interior, cooking over some coals.  The street had a gritty, urban feel; bustling, cars constantly pressing through the evening traffic, kids playing in side street courtyards, vendors still pushing fruit and vegetables, and even a traditional board game being played by older men right in the middle of the whole complex throng!  It was quite an atmosphere, and we were happy to have this new visual and pedestrian experience. 

The busy, colorful street

The street was lined with restaurants

And lots and lots of seafood!

See the plastic wrappings to keep the dishes clean, even as they sit out along the street?

This is the kebab-cooking urn

A bright, colorful, fruit and vegetable stand

Such concentration in the midst of the bustle!

We exited the bus at 7:10, with a half moon in a still blue sky hanging right over the mountain that we can see from our apartment window.

Our beautiful moon view over the mountain

Tuesday, May 29

While we were shopping in Uniqlo (cool clothing shop!), Julia said, “she (the clerk) just said, 1, 2, 3, I heard her say ‘ee, er, san.’  I know how to count to 4—ee, er, san, si."  So, I guess the whole trip was worth the effort, smelly food, and funky plumbing.  Nice to get such a concrete return on one’s effort!

I had my own breakthrough, today, about the language.  In the school van every morning, Julia and Alex have been playing Hangman, essentially a spelling game.  It came to me today that 1.) this game cannot be played in Chinese, as ‘characters’ are not single, like letters.  A character is composed, often, of several elements that are characters themselves.  A character represents a concept, not a letter.  2.) The Chinese have graciously provided Pinyun writing for characters:  the pinyun for the neighborhood in which I live (my closely guarded cue card for taxi drivers!) is Hai xin guang chang.  This is, essentially, a phonetic spelling in western letters of the sounds that are used to express the characters. At some point, elements of character sounds were coordinated with western letters.  My breakthrough is that the Chinese don’t use Pinyun! It is a crutch for non-Chinese.  Maggie confirmed this insight—she said that students in the 1^st, 2^nd grade range make use of Pinyun as they build an initial bank of vocabulary.  But once a Chinese speaker gets over the first writing hump, Pinyun has no useful function, except to allow them to write closely guarded cue cards for the naïve and illiterate!

Other language bits:  at the Fun Fair, I was part of a team doing the obstacle course.  My task was to walk down the length, signaling to children what to do at each stage.  The last task was to throw a stone, hop a hopscotch course, and then run quickly back to the starting line.  So, I would mime hopping, then turn their bodies, talking all the while of course, and wind up and then point my arm and hand emphatically back to the start, loudly shouting “RUNNNNNN as fast as you can,” under the theory that communication would be effected by the loudness and enthusiasm of my expression!  The universal language of emotion!

I have developed some ‘universal language’ tools in the classroom: what makes me think these are communicating?  I click my tongue to say ‘come on, let’s go.’ And I use a thumb up to mean ‘exactly; you got that right.’  And I have noticed that many of the children are much more comfortable with me now, so much so that they speak a lot of Chinese to me.  Do they think I am just holding out on them?!  At least they try me, before they head to another teacher.  It suggests that they believe I am useful!  We are singing more in circle time; they are enthusiastic singers, and several of them continue to hum through the morning whatever songs we had sung earlier; I like that a lot!  If you were listening closely today at about 9:30 pm, you probably heard them shouting “Hurrah” from “If you’re happy and you know it…”  They put 100% of their souls into that word!

Today Julia had to get a photo taken as part of an application for alien resident status, something those with student visas need to do.  So we took a car ride at lunch time to the other school owned by the group which owns QAIS—a ride so long that Julia and I both thought we had left the city!  An hour’s drive for a 5 minute appointment with a camera.  Chinese cities are huge!  Partly because they are spread out.  The road we took wound along the coastline which was beautiful.  We want to go back and explore that shoreline, the beaches and bays that are over on that far side of the city.  We were, apparently, about 10 minutes from the site of a well–recommended mountain and temple.  The aides told me there are wonderful waterfalls and fields of flowers along the walk up to the temple.  We’ll see if we can negotiate the bus trip out there.

Here is the other school we visited

As we moved from the downtown area into some attractive housing areas and on into the outskirts of the city, we repeatedly saw modern architecture, quite large structures, really impressive sports stadiums, and poverty close by in every direction.  The areas where permanent markets are held—there are many all through the city—are single story structures, permanent but which look fragile, about to collapse, held together with ingenuity and scraps.  They look bad, frankly, and quite poor.  And it struck me today that among all these many markets and street vendors, identical products are being sold:  cherries, watermelons, hair things, shoes, clothes, Chinese vegetables.  So, in effect, the market vendors are in competition with one another.  One might walk through the extensive market area, shopping, bargaining, socializing; but the truth is that the range of products is fairly circumscribed.  

Whether you buy your cherries from vendor A or B, or wait until you reach vendor T, is probably a randomly made decision; and whether you buy them at the market or from the local vegetable stand means a lack or gain in income for each that probably has an impact.  When I buy my bananas from Carrefour, I feel guilty about not buying them at the hill vegetable stand.  However, that saleswoman wants me to buy the whole bunch, not just 4 at a time; and she displays a bunch with 15-20 bananas.  Many more than I can eat before they become virtual banana bread!   It’s fascinating, really, how much one-to-one selling is going on in this huge urban area.  It hasn’t all disappeared into the maw of Walmart.  Whether it’s profitable is an open question.

Despite the poverty, though, I must note that these market areas do not feel unsafe.  On the Saturday morning when Julia and I walked to the Lotus story, we walked past a market area, with its broken pavements, stained walls, dirt floors, canvas roofs, and people squatting in the doorways, etc.  Yet, I did not feel any concern whatsoever that I or my daughter could be harmed by those squatters, mostly men. They don’t have much, their lives are very different than mine, but they were not hostile to me.  Julia scooters far in front of me every day; I am not worried about her being harmed or taken.  It’s just not a factor in this culture.  I worry about her near the streets, and she has clear rules about crossing streets (you simply cannot believe the aggressive ways that cars push themselves into and/or across lanes, no matter the hypothetical rules), but I do not worry about her getting out of my sight.  I find that fascinating; poverty and danger are so closely linked in American cultural beliefs.

Here is one of those very busy streets...

...And Julia dutifully waiting to cross safely!

Yesterday morning Mr. Lee, school van driver, took a different route because the traffic was so heavy (it’s heavy on Mon-Wed, but noticeably lighter on Thursday and Friday).  We wound around and about for 20 minutes, sometimes getting into what should have been one lane back alleys but were now being used as two way streets for a steady stream of cars—well, steadily waiting for a break in one direction to allow the other direction to jump into the roadway.  Even Maggie acknowledged that she, a native of Qingdao, had no idea where we were!  I felt I had broadened my perspective.  The effect of today’s trip out for the photograph, therefore, was to make me realize what a tiny corner of Qingdao I have seen and explored so far! 

That puts into a different perspective the fact that we have only 5 weekends left in China—wait, I correct myself, having just checked:  we have only 4 weekends left in China!  Wow, how can that be?  We have to get to the mountain and temple, we need to see the zoo, we haven’t been to the beach yet, or wandered far down the boardwalk, we have to find the Jimu Lo shopping area to bargain for tea sets and pearls (!), we haven’t shopped at the RT Mart yet, nor had our second meal at the hotel buffet restaurant, and we have to squeeze Julia’s birthday celebration into a weekend night.  We have to find the market area that sells yarn—I must have the fun of yarn shopping in China!  We haven’t been into the Old City, nor to the former German area with its European style architecture.  We want to do some serious kite flying at the Kite Park.  We need to bring the bunnies home for a weekend of ownership, and we would like to make one or two more play dates, maybe get Alex over to the hill for some scootering.  I had better get cracking!

Scootering home after school

Monday, May 28

Little Valia is leaving QAIS for the summer; going back to Greece.  So we celebrated her birthday in class today, which offered the chance to take some good group photos.  The kids were really into the whole Montessori birthday ritual.

Here are a series of photographs from the birthday celebration process:

Birthday treats

The whole group, with Mia and Subrina!

Birthday girl Valia and friends

Part of the Montessori birthday process

More birthday - and a peek at parts of my classroom

Valia and the class working on her Montessori birthday!

Alas, my battery dried up at this point, so the photographic record was paused.  Too bad, because when we hit the community hill at about 4:45 pm today, the scooter race thing took on another, happy, layer.  Julia scootered past a group of people, one of whom was ‘the boy’, who whipped his scooter around to chase after her on the up stage of the hill.  He got momentarily tangled in grandfather’s legs, as grandfather reached over to tell him ‘the girl’ had arrived.  It was so funny—even grandfather has gotten into the event!  He shouted something at the boy as he raced away, and then caught my eye.  I smiled, “Ni hao, ni hao.” (hello, hello).  And we both recognized that parental urge to provide our child with his/her heart’s delight—in this case, a serial scooter race.

Additional footnote:  after we deposited our stuff and had a drink, we went out again for some exercise for Mama.  As we got to the top of the hill, a 6-7 year old boy was wheeling his plasma car into position for a zip down the hill.  Julia used her best non-verbal techniques to indicate to him that she was ready and willing for a race.  It took a few tries, but communication occurred, and soon, the race was again on!  She was pleased with herself for achieving this successful response to her play needs. 

When that reached its natural end, we continued our walk, encountering, at last, something that resembles an American playground.  No monkey bars, unfortunately, but things to climb and swing on.  Photos tomorrow! As I believe we will visit this spot numerous times!  She was reluctant to leave after an interval, even though it was merely a minor play space compared to, say, the Potawatomie Park at home.  An unmet need gets met?!  Some of what is included in Chinese play spaces is really exercise equipment, used primarily by older people throughout the day who do a lot of public exercising of various sorts.  I was happy to use the leg swing; too much sitting in my life (although, I do climb 4 flights of stairs at least 6 times every day!).

I forgot to mention the Pink parade that went along the boardwalk, past the QAIS soccer field on Saturday, while we were Fun Fairing it.  It has all the trappings of a breast cancer awareness walk.  Lots of great pink balloons to catch one’s attention.  And pink shirts with panda faces—I want one!  Who knew the Chinese government would support breast cancer research?

The pink parade!

We took this photo of many rags hanging out after, presumably, a washing.  They were hanging on the fence line right smack downtown, next to a plush hotel.  The funniest thing!  It points, in part, to the lack of free space—and dryers.  As we walked through the community tonight, we saw sheets and towels draped over bushes on the ground level.  One answer to the question I had about where I’d dry my sheets.

Drying rags

These pink petunias and yellow zinnas are everywhere right now, lined up in orderly rows at gates and entrance ways; they must have been decreed by the authorities.  I envision a cadre of workers, at night, placing row after row of flowers.  Is there some gigantic government run greenhouse where 100s of 1000s of these flowers are being propagated?!

I took this photo of a van driving under an awning to try to give some perspective of the size of this van.  While it ostensibly has three rows of seats—meaning it fits 6?—it looks tiny!  Notice how much room there is on the side of this van as it goes under the second awning!

In our travels, I took a couple of photos of teenage girls—what a lovely and universal thing is a teenage girl!  Don’t you wish you could pull off this purple skirt?  There are scads of uniformed girls (and boys) everywhere one looks.  These two could be anywhere in the world, in their personal style and their deep need to sit talking endlessly with one another.  This hill is really a community center; like an extension of the apartment, a living room.  Stands to reason that the apartments are smallish—everything in a city must be so expensive for the natives.  From my perspective, though, Qingdao seems quite cheap.  The imported food is more expensive than at home—Nutella for $8.00; but then, it’s the jumbo jar.  Sunmaid raisins for $5.00.  So, not outrageously expensive, and very much worth the money!  The Japanese ex-pat I spoke with yesterday agreed that it is quite inexpensive—of course, she noted, she arrived here from Switzerland, via London and Tokyo, none cheap!

Just a fabulous skirt!

Chatting girls

This second pictures is later - still talking away!

As we entered into our nightly contest with the front door of the apartment (keys are not my friends), the door of the apartment across the tiny hall opened and “Jen” stuck her head out of the door.  She is 10, in the 4^th grade, and clearly interested in making our acquaintance.  Mother soon put her head out as well, and definitively offered ‘she can play with Jen’s toys’—so we’ll see where that goes!  There was a decent level of English with both (kids all learn English in school), so I am hopeful.  Of course, who makes the next move?  Do we knock on the door and invite ourselves in to play?  Stayed tuned!