Clip Show Round 2

So laziness has struck again, plus we've had about three different trips that I haven't recounted and it seems too late to give each their own separate post at this point.  That being said, here's Thailand, Chongqing, Lufeng Valley and Kunming in pictures.

Waiting patiently for our plane to Bangkok

New Years Carnival in Hua Hin

More carnival

More Hua Hin

Hua Hin train station

Up for sunrise

Eating sand

Riding the elephants

Feeding the elephants

Bathing the elephants

While they rode an elephant, I got to visit with her.  She must be the oldest elephant alive

At least in the pool he couldn't eat sand

Visiting a temple in Bangkok

More temple

We went from Thailand, to this....Chongqing, a city of 27 million where it's considered a sunny day when you can see your shadow.

This is a terrible picture, but it's funny because this was the last stronghold of the resistance against the communist regime so they've set up a special square and clocktower as a monument to communism.  If you look closely at the clocktower/monument thing, it says Rolex on it.  So-Communism, brought to you by Rolex. 

Friends in Chongqing

New Year's fireworks did little to improve the air quality

We were happy to get back to Kunming and see the sun again.  This is the kids at the Yunnan minority village.  

This is a Bai minority village

And a Dai minority temple

The real minorities in Kunming

A trip to Lufeng Valley (Dinosaur Valley)

This was some kind of evolution exhibition.  I guess we will all eventually evolve into multicolored frog-men

Out and about around Kunming

Enjoying and evening out with friends at Kunming's only Irish pub.

And since that photo brings me to last night's dinner, I would say I'm pretty well caught up.

Boredom and Lunch Tables

While I've encountered problems living in China these are NOT among them.  This is the first of a couple posts I hope to dedicate to the things I fear the most when going back to the US.  Boredom will be the first post, beating out my fears of not finding jobs, driving on a highway again, legal firearms, painfully bland foodand seasonal affective disorder.  

I'm not saying I don't have dear friends back home.  I'm also not saying there are no interesting people to meet.  I think there are just so many dear and interesting people that we have the luxury of choosing those who are exactly like us.  Having been homeschooled up until Jr. High, it wasn't until my first 7th grade lunch period when the girls started dragging desks around our homeroom to create separate tables that I realized I had to pick a "group."  In college it got even harder when I ended up being in both the Honors program and on the volleyball team.  The volleyball team tanned and partied with the basketball boys.  The Honors students clustered in the student lounge, studying and telling jokes about Descartes walking into a bar.  And I holed up in my dorm room and felt incredibly lonely, because you have to pick one, and those lunch tables just won't mix.  

This is the cool table...what makes you think you can sit here?

And I never stopped feeling like I had to choose.  Whenever I met new people, I felt like I was getting sized up.  Political views, theology, what I read, what I listen to, how much I make, what I'm wearing and whether or not my kids are gluten free.  It's like we're shifting the desks and dividing up all over again.  I'm just as guilty of it as anyone, having made my share of snide comments about everything from someone's taste in literature to what they ate for breakfast.  I even remember criticizing someone's favorite Thai restaurant.  At length.  Like there aren't bigger differences in the world that we need to worry about.  What I didn't realize is that if you stick with your lunch table group forever, you start running out of things to talk about.  You all shop at the same stores, read the same books and pretty much have the same philosophies about everything.  Maybe someone could take you out to a new restaurant except, oh yeah, you wrote that person off because they didn't know anything about authentic Thai food.  Mostly you just sit around agreeing with each other and slamming everyone who doesn't think like you.  How so-and-so must have spent a fortune on her dress ("sooo materialistic!") and so-and-so read Twilight ("soooo immature!") and so-and-so gave her kid a pop-tart for breakfast ("DOES SHE WANT HER KID TO DIE!?!? THE HUMANITY!!").  You have so much in common, in fact, there's no need to talk about much else.  When you can pick from 300 things to say that are going to be accepted by the group, why say the 1 thing that pops into your head that might cause a stir?

Why mention that you're lonely?  That you don't feel like there's anyone you can talk to about your real life.  That your unsure about your parenting.  That your unsure about your life in general.  That you wish God was more real to you.  That you really don't want to talk about all the benefits of breastfeeding.  Again.  That you gave your kid a pop-tart once and now you're afraid if anyone finds out, you won't have a lunch table anymore. 

I have three really good friends here.  One was a platoon leader that got a full scholarship to West Point and served two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.  She's knows what she thinks and she's going to say it-lunch table etiquette be damned.  Around her, I don't feel like I have to pretend.  Another friend is from a hardscrabble neighborhood in Brooklyn where you couldn't pick a group that wasn't doing something or other illegal, so she's used to going against the current.  She doesn't spend a minute being insecure about her own choices and consequently doesn't waste a second judging others.  I feel no need to explain or justify anything.  Then there's my friend who went to Harvard and has a law degree and makes me explain or justify everything I say...because she honestly values my opinions and the reasoning that got me there.  She can't wait to talk to someone who thinks differently than she does because she knows it will help her to learn and explore and clarify.  It's the first time I've had to articulate everything I think so clearly and it's the first of many times I've had to recognize I hadn't thought through something or was just flat out wrong.  I actually have to think.  And be honest.  And be vulnerable.  I have to take ownership of my ideas and choices and feelings because they're actually mine now...not just "the group's."  Chances are that everyone won't agree with me.  And that's ok.  Because it gives us so much more to talk about.  

Which is why I really fear going back to the lunchroom.  Because I don't want to have to choose a group and I don't want to forever resign myself to an endless loop of breastfeeding and gluten conversations.  Because there are a lot of interesting people in the world with a lot of interesting things to say if it was a little more acceptable to just pick up your stupid lunch tray and sit down next to them.  

One year and counting...

After being nudged along by my wife to post a little something (just kidding, it was my turn), I decided to pre-emptively answer (just for fun...for me)  what I'm sure will be some of the most common questions we will be asked when we get back to the US later this year.

Question #1 "So what was it like in China?"

Really? Please. Think of something more creative, unless you have a couple hundred hours for me to explain, and you're gonna be buying the drinks. 

I'll indulge you anyway. China is a big, big place. 1.3 billion people and lots and lots of big cities and lots and lots of tiny, rural farms. Why people think it is all the same is beyond me. Just think of America: how similar are the cities and lives of people living in the hills of Tennessee with those living in Seattle? Well, Beijing or Shanghai are quite a bit different than Kunming. Among other things, the sun shines here. Think that's funny? It's not if you live in one of the enormous industrial cities like Chongqing. We visited CQ and it is miserable. If you can barely make out your shadow on the ground, its a sunny day. 

Kunming on the other hand, is about 10-15 years behind the rest of China in terms of development. For example, stoplights have been around this city of seven million for about six years but if you are on a bike or scooter, you can often simply ignore a red light. My kids are terribly confused. There are a lot of foreigners here and the year-round Spring-like weather makes it easy to stay. I've come to love it here and the people-foreigner and local alike-are so helpful. The wealth-poverty gap is simply gargantuan (picture a brand new Ferrari driving down the road next to a foot-pedaled garbage collecting bicycle ridden by a 50 year-old woman). I've never gotten used to that here. The guy outside my window right now collecting our community garbage looks 60. But nobody bats an eyelash.

Question #2 "Is learning Chinese (Mandarin) hard?"

Hmmm. Let me think about that one for a sec... 

Yes. It is. But you had better start counting your lucky stars because learning Mandarin is EASY compared to learning English. I've met so many bilingual people here it is amazing, and every time I remember how fortunate I am to be a native English speaker. I've done some English teaching here and as soon as you open that can of worms you realize how hard it is to explain when and why to use I, me, or mine or to teach a junior high kid how to use the correct verb tense in her second language. Even as you are teaching a given grammar rule, you are already thinking about all the ways you break that rule. English is endlessly confusing--even to Americans.

But yes, I can speak a little Mandarin. Enough to make locals laugh at me.

Question #3 "What did you eat/What was the food like?"

Once you eat local food in Kunming, American food seems disgusting, bland, and completely unimaginative (aside from the corn dog, that is pretty creative, and delicious). Granted, there are a lot of things I will never eat: worms, maggots, pigs feet, chicken feet, etc. though they are all readily available. Most food here is spicy, the vegetables are fresh, and it is simply amazing. Lots of rice? Yes. But you need it to tone down the hot peppers. Mexican food would be somewhat comparable in the sense that it is spicy and has a lot of vegetables, but the flavor is definitely unique. Most people here in Kunming eat boiled greens and rice or noodles with some veggies, often three times a day. Our helper makes the most delicious spicy noodle dish I've ever had. I really could eat it for breakfast. We think it is annoying to go out and buy food fresh from the market everyday. But Chinese people think it is disgusting to buy food and let it sit in your fridge for days or weeks. Hmmm...good point.

Question #4 "Living in  Southeast Asia sounds amazing. Tell me about traveling there?"

Sure, no problem. Imagine you want to go on vacation: Florida, California, whatever. So you have a friend take you and your family to the airport. So far so good. Same here. You are arrive at your destination after a two hour flight. Same here. You get off the plane and find your driver to pick you up and take you to your hotel...but now your driver doesn't speak English and is holding a piece of paper with your name (incorrectly) written on it. You whisper a quick prayer that this guy is legit before helping your wife and three kids into his minivan. You really hope he knows how to get you to your hotel because its 7pm and time for your kids to go to bed and your hotel is a two hour drive away. He does. I feel relieved. After you safely arrive and enjoy a week or so at your hotel on the beach (not so bad, I admit), its time to go back home. So again, time to schedule a driver to take us to the airport. Again, barely any English. Again, two hours. But this time, the driver takes us to the wrong airport in Bangkok. We obviously miss our once-a-day flight from BKK to KM.  That is how traveling goes, at least sometimes.

Question #5 "But seriously, what was it like to live abroad with three kids under five?"

Well, when we got here, a simple thing like going to get food was about all we could get done in a single day. When we got off the plane I could count the words I could say in Chinese on just my fingers. A few months in and after we were both working and had made friends with a couple of expats and their families, in a lot of ways it was just like living in the US. You work, you eat, you change diapers. With kids, you just aren't off hiking trails and taking night trains to Shangri-la all the time. Most of the time you are up all night because someone is sick, not because you are looking at the stars from some mountaintop in some far-flung paradise. 

One of the best things about being here is that we live so close to our friends and can walk over and just let our kids play. In the US, just seeing people you care about often involves a 20 minute trip in the van plus prep time. Here, its a text and shoes and the diaper bag and we are there. Its made me rethink urban living. I can walk five minutes out my door and have just about anything essential to life, and I'm in China. 

Yes, I said W-A-L-K. We've done a lot of that here. My kids are champs. My kids walk more in a day here than I walked in a month in the US. Even the old folks here can walk farther than Americans in the flower of youth. When we first arrived in KM and had to fend for ourselves and didn't know where to get food to make complete meals, it was like fat camp. We ate fruit, vegetables, and oatmeal because that was all we could wrap our heads around in a foreign place with some weird food. But now I love it. Can't even imagine driving again. We walk or bike or I take the electric scooter if one of the kids wants to come with me. Taxis are available of course, but buses are the preferred way of traveling if its just one parent for three kids. 

Living in Kunming has been an adventure as a family. Something we will always be able to remember and talk about and laugh every time. So many little things happened and so many places were visited that I am sad to think I will forget some of them. We've come a long way in a year from when we got on a plane in San Francisco. Eve and I look at each other all the time and say, "wow, we live in China." It's true, and its been amazing.

Why we took a quarter life retirement

I figure a year into our trip, it's about time to give everyone a little background on why we even came in the first place.  I can't speak for John, perhaps he owes everyone a post of his own, but I personally saw it as sort of a quarter-life retirement with a little bit of young life crisis and some gap year thrown in.  With 3 preschool aged children of course.  This doesn't really strike me as strangely as it strikes most, since most of my life has been done out of order anyway.  I was never one to follow predetermined structure.  Not that I didn't want to, lest you think I'm trying to paint myself as some sort of free spirit struggling to break the confines of societal expectations.  I won't say I love societal expectations either, but I've always craved them, like any good little neurotic co-dependent would.  Most of my life has revolved around grades and scales and stopwatches, but I'm one of those crash and burn types.  The type who starves themselves for 5 days and then binges on the weekend, or who gets straight A's the first semester, and drops out the next.  All told, I've dropped out of school 5 times, probably gained and lost hundreds of pounds and attempted to master no less than 4 instruments and 5 sports.  I've also written the first chapter of about 4 different novels.  Point being, I'd do just about anything for a pat on the back, which is probably why I couldn't stand the thought of NOT graduating college, even after I was married with a kid.  So forget the life plan where you graduate college, do your gap year, get married, flourish in your career, buy a dream home and then decorate a nursery.  We got engaged the day my husband started his first full-time job, got married 8 weeks later and were surprised exactly 9 months and 6 days after our wedding by a beautiful little bundle of colic, skin rashes and food allergies.  Did I say that?  I meant joy.  Bundle of joy. 

Anyways, since I was hell-bent on finishing college, but the only way to stop the bundle of joy from screaming was to make sure he was permanently attached to my boob, I wrote my final papers with a laptop propped up sideways so I could lay next to my nursing newborn.  Of course I couldn't stop there, because a walking inferiority complex is never satisfied.  Once the bundle of joy was old enough to start putting everything in his mouth, the screaming abated somewhat and I moved right on to graduate school.  Somehow part time turned into full-time and one bundle of joy became two and pretty soon I was the only student racing out of class to nurse my baby during breaks.  My husband had, in the meantime, moved his way from lowly barista to store manager, which meant he was doing pretty much the same thing (making sure you got your sugar-free no-whip, double tall vanilla soy latte in less than 97 seconds) only for 60 hours a week rather than 40.  By the time I was ready to graduate, bundle #3 was ready to make his way into the world, I was working way too many thankless and unpaid hours as a counseling intern who ended up organizing my boss' file cabinets far more often than I did any counseling.  John would leave at 3:30 AM to open the store and come back in time to pass off kids before I went to my internship or night classes.  I came back from night classes in time to put the bundles back to sleep for the 2nd or 3rd time with about 6 hours to sleep before they were up to greet the sun.  Then there was the fact that the resounding consensus I heard from every mom with 3 or more kids was that 3 children was where you descend into a murky mom-haze from which you won't emerge until all your kids can sleep through the night and fix themselves breakfast.  You'll apparently wake up after your first morning of 10 uninterrupted hours of sleep wondering who you are and where the last 4-15 years of your life went (depending on how many more kids you have).  One mom also described having 3 young kids as being the same as her natural labor-agonizing pain somehow tempered by your body's natural happy bonding drugs that it produces for these sorts of occasions.  I have had 3 all natural labors and, while they were beautiful in their own right, I have no desire to experience them for years on end.  Also, the whole dissasociative experience doesn't sound great to me.  Also, let's go back to the hubby's 60 hour workweeks and my graduate degree that gave me the opportunity to keep doing my thankless internship work for about as much as I used to make babysitting.

I didn't want to see John only while trading off kids so we could both work more hours than we wanted at jobs we didn't like.  I also didn't want to give up on work I know I would love if I got the chance to leave the file room.  I didn't want to miss the bundles' entire childhood because I was in a sleep-deprived mom-haze.  I also didn't want to give up working part time and never have a reprieve from the aforementioned mom-haze.  I didn't want to spend the kids' most formative years just "managing" them-making sure everyone made it through the day alive and fed.  I didn't want to turn down reading books and building block towers because I was walking the baby to sleep or dinner needed to be made.    

And like most things in life, there's always have an alternative.  We could have searched for an alternatives in the US.  There were definitely ways to slow down what we were doing.  We could have made a lot of tradeoffs, but instead we decided to think outside the box and find some way where we didn't have to give up any of our biggest priorities.

And I think it's worked.  John has had a chance to bond with the kids and has given me a chance to regain my self and sanity without mom-haze swallowing me whole.  We're a way better and more balanced parenting team.  We have the time and energy to take care of ourselves and consequently have the time and energy to be present and focused with the kids.  I never have to multitask and so I'm a mom rather than a manager.  We're so blessed in so many ways and being out of the US keeps us constantly reminded of that fact.  We've met so many amazing and interesting people and been able to see ourselves through the eyes of people who haven't known us our whole lives.  Also, it's 70 and sunny outside and I'm snacking on fresh pineapple and sipping water straight from a coconut.  In your face Chicago,

The rat race, the American Dream, keeping up with the Jones', or whatever else you call it....it's way over-rated.

Here's to doing life a little out of order.                    

White Christmas

Two posts in a month.  My Christmas present to you:)  I know, I've really outdone myself.

Mostly I just wanted to post a few pictures to complain about...

How pathetic our Christmas tree was:

How we moved to what the Chinese call "the City of Eternal Spring" and yet somehow managed to have the first subfreezing temperatures they've had in a decade and the first snow they've had in 15 years:

And how weird their Christmas traditions are:

1. Anyone dressed as Santa must always carry a magical staff.  Apparently because he has a beard they associate him with the only other bearded Western figures they know-Gandalf and Dumbledore.  We call him Sandalf.

2.  The only gifts they give are apples and they give them on Christmas Eve.  Because the word for Christmas Eve and the word for apple sound the same, so it only stands to reason.  The only wrapping paper they sell comes in 12x12 squares and is literally translated as "apple paper"

3. If you want to celebrate the Chinese New Year, you give gifts to people if it is "their year"  (this coming New Year is the year of the horse).  The best gift to give people? Red underwear.  Apparently whenever it is "your year" you must wear red underwear.  Every day.  All year.  So you need a lot of it.

The funny thing is, it's the best Christmas we've ever had.  So little stress and so much gratitude for all the little things, like Christmas pjs to camp out by the tree, 

friends to share Christmas with,

eating American food for the first time since Thanksgiving 

and our sweet neighbor who came over on Christmas morning to give our kids Sandalf staffs before he had to go to school.

That's not to say we didn't miss our friends and family back home...we love you all and hope you had a Merry Christmas!!