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!