After they finished the surgery, they took out all of the equipment they hooked me into including the epidural catheter from which I was told painkillers will be given for forty eight hours post delivery.

Continue Reading "The Birth - Part Two (The Nasty Bit)"

On Monday evening, I began having regular contractions that came about every fifteen minutes. They kept me up the night on and off.

Around five the next morning, I woke Buchela's Daddy up and suggested we go to the hospital to check things out.

Continue Reading "Inmate 8011 at Dalian Hospital"

Location: Next door

Players: Buchela, Chen Chen, and Chen Chen's Cousin

Photographer: A very surprised Me

When my son goes next door to play he usually ends up riding one of Chen Chen's cars around. Chen Chen has a few and one of them is huge. Buchela loves them all.

This time, to my surprise, I found him deeply engaged in a game I never thought he'd ever get the chance to play.

War.

Continue Reading "War Games"

Remember I talked about my fear of spiders? Well, tis the season for spiders here in Dalian.

They are seemingly all over the place!

For MORE Photos, Click on the link at the bottom.

Continue Reading "Arachnophobia II"

We usually walk to places. It is the best way to slow down and be in the moment.

On the way to our favorite Japanese restaurant, there are these short trees on the side walk. We have, on more than one occasion, run into spider webs by simply walking past one of them.

I am afraid of spiders.

I think spiders are scarier than snakes. When I was little, I was afraid they will climb into my mouth and multiply if it hung open when I fell deeply asleep.

So, I slept under the covers.

Imagine my horror then, when I saw this massive spider on the way back from enjoying our perfectly delicious Japanese dinner. The beast was so big, at first, I thought it was something else caught in the web.

Upon the realization that it was, in fact, a spider I was, all of a sudden, seeing them everywhere I looked there after. My skin started to crawl giving me the distinct feeling that a few of them were under my shirt and pants.

I freaked.

Buchela's father remained calm and took pictures.

For MORE Photos, Click on the Continue Reading link at the bottom.

Continue Reading "Arachnophobia I"

We are traveling on Friday and the thirteenth.

Oh oh.

...we went to lunch with another couple to a great little Korean restaurant by the sea. The Kai Fa Qu beach, located twenty minutes walk away from our apartment, has rows of restaurants that serve a variety of good foods. These restaurants are built on a higher ground and with entire front walls opening towards the sea to afford the maximum view. We ordered several dishes and began enjoying each one as they came to the table.

As always, there were lots of people enjoying a day out by the water. Some were playing soccer or volleyball while others just lounged, swam and drank beer. Once in a while, I looked at the sea, far beyond the multitude of people at the shore and marveled at its very size. I felt serene.

Then all of a sudden, there was a commotion in the restaurant next door and a man came running out with blood spurting from his forehead and dripping down his right eye, cheeks and then chin onto his gray t-shirt. He put one hand over the wound but the blood escaped between his fingers and kept on flowing.

Closely following, pointing towards him, and screaming was a little girl who couldn't have been more than 11 years old. I assumed she was his daughter. I thought she was asking for help.

The man kept on looking towards diners in the row of restaurants and shouting something in Chinese. I assumed he was also asking for help.

But no one helped him.

No one gave him a towel. No one gave him tissue paper. No one gave him ice. No one tried to calm the little girl. No one tried to talk to them.

Everyone, the people that were playing soccer, the half naked tanned teenage boys that were playing volleyball, the men that were drinking beer, the girls that were giggling, the boys that were making the girls giggle, the parents that were making sand castles with their children, the people that shuffled along the restaurant sidewalks, the diners, and us, ... We all just looked on.

And a few seconds later, as the little girl continued her screaming and the father franticly walked back and forth shouting something at the people around him, the activities surrounding them resumed as if the whole thing wasn't happening.

And soon, it wasn't. The man and the little girl were gone.

As foreigners, we have been warned by different sources to never get involved in domestic issues. So, we didn't do anything. That is our excuse.

What was the Chinese people's excuse?

-------
About the photo: The photo below was taken after the man and the little girl left. Soon after I took this picture, someone put sand over the blood and passersby walked on it not knowing what the thin cover of sand was hiding.

... is very close to a district hospital. I can see it's compound from my kitchen window. Some days, people gather at the backdoor of the hospital (see picture below) to retrieve their dead.

The affair of picking up bodies from what I assume is the morgue has been a rather composed process. People bring huge flower arrangements to put on the body. They light incenses. They offer their gods some food. Although I have never heard them, I could see them cry. Finally, the day after, in the morning, they come back to shoot some fireworks.

Last night, around 9 p.m, as we sat comfortably watching a movie, we heard a cry. At first, we thought it was the child next door throwing one of his tantrums. When that didn't seem to be the case, we then considered the voice might be coming from upstairs.

We muted the TV and listened. It occurred to us that it was in fact coming from the hospital. In all the months we've lived in our apartment, we have never actually heard someone cry. While we are close enough to observe, we are too far to actually hear what is going on at the hospital.

I ran to the kitchen window to check. There, I saw a woman, sprawled on the ground, totally out of control with grief. The noise coming out of her was guttural, animal like. She repeated the same words over and over as she screamed on top of her lungs.

People tried to talk to her, pick her up, and remove her from the ground. But she fought every single one of them, pushed them away, kicked them with her legs and continued to scream and thrash on the pavement.

An hour later, while I prepared to go to sleep, I could still hear her, her voice hoarse and weakened but the grief still continuing to convulse her entire being.

As I slowly sank into sleep, I thought to myself, this woman must have lost a child.

Well... well... well, the the censors have been busy. First they blocked Blogger so I have to use proxies to see websites with blogspot.com addresses.

And now, they have blocked Flicker. I guess someone has been posting incriminating pictures?

I hope they don't get my website next.

Note to self: ENOUGH SAID! STOP TALKING!

We really like the pediatrician. She was very helpful. Most importantly, we could understand her English and she seemed to understand ours.

In this picture, Buchela is being weighed on a cool scale with a tiny little toddler size chair. They also took length and head measurement.

Afterwards, the pediatrician sat me down on a bench and explained the results as the following: "Baby skinny. Like his mother. For a girl it is okay. For a boy, not good! He is a boy...pause... He also short...pause... And has very big head."

My poor little dude!

We need to start working on his personality right away. It doesn't look like he will be getting by with his looks!

May be because of the dust and sweat from all the fun running around last week, unbeknowest to me, my hair had became tangled into, ohhh, about five clumps of dreadlocks.

As I struggled to wash it and work through the knots with massive amounts of conditioner, the image of scissors danced in my head daring me to chop it off.

Then I noticed one tooth from my comb has gone missing. I searched in my hair and found the broken piece. I reminded myself to comb gently and I resumed working.

Then, all of a sudden, I felt another tooth break. I finished unraveling the tangles with my hands and my broken comb cussing Chinese cheap plastic under my breath.

So, you may be asking, why is this a big deal? After all, I could go out and buy another comb, right?

Noooo. As if it were that easy!

Getting my current one took countless hours of searching for a wide toothed comb that can accommodate my curly mass of a hair. It was the strongest and the biggest one I could find at the time.

I am sure, finding another one will be just as daunting.

-----

P.S. My eternally helpful husband suggests I use a fork.

If I write their name on the board for the first time, it is a warning. If I put a 10 beside it, that means the student has to write ten different sentences. If I write 20, then she has to write 20, if I write 30... you get the picture.

Since English is their second language, making sentences is kind of difficult for them and they really hate having to do it.

The other day, I told one of my students, in addition to doing his homework, to write ten different sentences for the next day.

The next day he came back with:

1. My mother has gray hair.
2. My mother has black hair.
3. My mother has brown hair.
4. My mother has light brown hair.
5. My mother has blue hair.
6. My mother has red hair.
7. My mother has green hair.
8. My mother has yellow hair.
9. My mother has purple hair.
10. My mother has orange hair.

In a fit of anger, I yelled at him "These are not different sentences!"

He replied in an exasperated voice, "but teacher... green, red, black... very different!" He threw his hands up into the air feigning total confusion.

But I could see a smile twinkling in his eyes because he knew that I knew he has won this battle.

For a communist country, China is shockingly obsessed with making money and accumulating wealth. Advertising is absolutely everywhere and in all conceivable forms.

On planes, the back of the seats have ads. Marketing agents ride around on their bikes with a boom box on maximum volume, announcing new products. Grocery attendants yell at you with their over sized loudspeakers as you pass by and point to their assigned goodies. Sometimes, the back of the front seats in cabs have little TVs that play non stop commercials. There are big billboards everywhere.

But still, I was surprised to find our elevator, all of a sudden, outfitted with a TV set that spews loud commercials 12 hours a day.

I now take the stairs.

The plane shook so hard, I thought it was going to break apart. Even Paul, who is generally collected about the possibility of dying in a fiery crash, looked pretty concerned.

Afterwards, we talked and laughed about whether or not the Chinese pirate aircraft parts and put them in their domestic fleet.

So, when I read this article, I was like... oh no!
-----------------
BERLIN - China will soon be threatening major Western aircraft makers, Boeing boss James McNerney said in a forthcoming interview.

Source China Daily. Click here to read article.