Day 3

Woke up this morning and looked out the window across the parkland they built over the underground Wal-Mart to the big jumbotron tuned to CNN and found out the Haiti earthquake. Keep them in your prayers - there are some quite impoverished people in the world, and some sections of China remind me just how blessed we all are. You can tell by the babbly nature of the email that Dean is writing. Overall it was a good day. Kris is upstairs doing homework and Karen is trying to get some much-needed sleep. Katie did not put up as much of a battle tonight, but she was tired all day. Katie has her own language that is a mix of Chinese and speech impediment - e.g. we and our guide figured out "nee han" is a twist on the Mandarin "nee can" (she has difficulty with hard consonants) and means "you look!" It is uncomfortable for me to be the one she bonds to most (something is wrong with the order of the universe there), but Karen and Kris are handing that fact gracefully. It is stressful to pick our battles carefully and balance the risk of spoiling vs. big public international meltdowns. What a culture shock! I so wish I knew the language better, but I only have myself to blame. Tina your picture book has come in handy, and I use that little black journal you gave me a lot. Dace and Susan the travel clothes work well. Today our guide took us to Quinling Park. The trip there was through construction and some very slummy neighborhoods (see above), but the park is beautiful and green even in January. The wild monkeys (macaques) were OK, and the park contained the largest Buddhist temple in the province. Not at all in our realm of previous experience, and beautiful, but we'll stick to Christianity. Anyway, I have lots of little details I could bore you with and an obscene number of pictures and movies to download if we ever work out the power issues. Thanks all, for the loans of the memory chips - we are still on the first 2 GB chip.