Sihai Park in Shenzhen

One of the great benefits of being a grade 1 teacher is getting to go on field trips. On Wednesday, we took our first graders to this local park about 15 minutes from our school. I was so taken with the variety of things to do there that I took our friends and family there again today.

To the left was a 15 piece band including two flutes, 3 mandolins, a cello, and 4 Chinese sitars (???). Of course the music was a little tinny for my western ears, but watching all of these folks play so joyfully for whoever showed up to watch will be something I won't forget.

Beautiful shaded areas dot the park. Here are the kids in a tree before they were asked to get down. What I didn't photograph were old guys playing Go and mahjang tiles, ballroom dancers, tai chi followers, and babies, babies, babies.

In other sections of the park were bumper car rides, foot powered boat rides, Chinese talking cockatiels, a tea house, duck and turtle fishing...

Finally here is a shot of a giant bull that was erected when they built the park four years ago. It was the year of the bull four years ago, of course.

The Lantern Festival

So it turns out that fireworks kind of go on endlessly around the time of the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival. Today, we learned in our Chinese tutorial, is the 15th day after the first day of the new year and is a festival called the Lantern Festival. There have been more dragon dancing, more cool dress up clothes, hard to recognize, but festive snacks, and right now at 8:45 in cool and rainy weather, endless firecrackers and fire works. I think this is the official end of the Chinese New Year so I guess that dogs are sleeping a bit more peacefully in China tonight... I couldn't help myself.

Learning Chinese. Today was our 5th lesson and despite what the kids say, we are getting better--learning more vocabulary and syntax, of course, but also learning more about the Chinese culture. Yesterday, I read a book review of "Dreaming in Chinese" by Deborah Fallows She, a linguist and fellow struggler with Chinese, posits that one can not truly understand a culture without being fluent in their language. That idea has been kicking around my head a lot and made some sense to me today when I learned that Chinese use the word zhu zai "to live" to describe wherever you are staying or visiting. So when Cherry, our tutor, found out that we were going to a hotel for one night this weekend in Hong Kong, she said that she would teach us "visit" or "stay at" dai zai but it is better to say zhu zai even if just for one night.

Maybe it means nothing, but I was thinking about how we definitely delineate home, house and other in English and would never say we lived in a hotel unless we were Eloise at the Plaza...right? What do you all think?

One Night in Bangkok

On our way to Koh Lanta, we spent a night in Bangkok. Yes, we sang that song endlessly much to the annoyance of the family with whom we were traveling. On our one day of sightseeing, we decided to take a boat ride down the river that cuts through the city. These are some of the shots from that trip. I don't actually know the names of the structures, so I will label the best we can. one of the wats, temples...
backside of big, golden Buddha. Isn't he fabulous?
Just a sign above a street near our hotel...

Monkeys and Elephants in Thailand

These are some of the beautiful animals we met in Thailand last week.
The baby elephant was a part of a roadside attraction. We paid $3 to feed and pet him and his parents. That is Renata in the helmet; we were motorbiking across the island of Koh Lanta and just happened upon the elephants and the fruit stand.
The two shots of the macaques came from a kayak trip in a mangrove forest. When we parked our kayaks close to the shore, our guide pulled pineapples and bananas out of his satchel. That is Luca getting up close and personal with the quickest one who saw the fruit in his hand. Amazing. I hated to miss any of the action by even taking pictures. Unforgettable.