Thailand was…..Amazing!

Elephants=Thailand. 

Thailand was never on my must see list. I’m so glad that I got some crazy idea one afternoon.  We decided to stop in three different cities over a two week period.  We started in Bangkok, then flew North to Chiang Mai and finally flew south to Phuket where we took an hour boat ride to a small island, KoYao Noi. We chose these different cities because they are geographically and socially very different. Jeff couldn’t stay the entire last week so he went back to work and left us on the island by ourselves. It was definitely his loss as we recharged our souls and bodies with total relaxation in our final week.

This post will just be about Bangkok. Gosh where do I start? It’s a bit like Vegas for me. I’m glad I went, but I found it stressful and seedy.

 We found a very nice hotel, which was really a two bedroom service apartment. We only had two and half days so we had a lot to explore in a short amount of time. We started by exploring on foot the area surrounding our hotel.  This part of the city was very busy, interesting and the people were nice enough. Two things I noticed right off, first they drive on the opposite side of the street as we do. This is mostly fine because we were taking taxis or tuk-tuks everywhere. Where it became a problem is when we tried to cross a busy street and it became difficult to remember which way to look before crossing. I kept almost walking out into traffic because I was looking for cars coming the wrong direction or around the wrong corners. It really messed with our minds. It seemed easy enough, but we were all messed up. The second thing that I noticed while walking down the street was many businesses had shoes piled out front. All of the customers removed their shoes before entering.  Having just left China, where you would never see that because they would be stolen by the time you left the store, it struck me as interesting.

Next we decided to take a long tail boat for a ride through the river to explore other parts of the city.

Long tail boats

  It seemed like when we entered the pier area we entered a whole new world. This was where the seedy portion of our trip began. It’s a little hard to explain, but the pier area had many small vendors selling their stuff or food items. Then there were long tail boats leaving the piers heading for other piers. The boards along the docks didn’t seem very safe and many were rotting. There was a loud speaker with announcements occasionally being made and all of them were warnings to avoid talking to strangers or being pickpocketed. There are beware of pick pocket signs everywhere.  We found the pier we were looking for eventually and realized that there wasn’t an exact place to get on a boat. There were many men with their own signs trying to negotiate a price. None of it was in English and most of their English was limited. We tried to negotiate a price and quickly realized that the man we were talking to was offering us a huge price for a quick ride. As Jeff was negotiating with the man regarding the boat ride I realized there was a man behind me who was holding up three fingers, but he was doing it in a very covert way. At first I was thinking he was trying to signal to the boat man something then I realized he was signaling to me the price I should pay. He finally got up and left the area, but at the last moment he was in my sight he showed me the three fingers again. At that point I was not sure whether he was trying to save me from paying too much or if he was friends with the boat man and he was trying to manipulate me. We finally settled on 300 Baht per person (we started at 800), which equated to about $10 each. We finally got on the boat. We headed down the river. We had a nice view of some of the city this way. Next we got off the boat at another pier. We tried to visit the Royal Temple, but by that time it was fairly late in the afternoon and there was a huge line. Many people stopped us and tried to “Help”. It appeared that they were being helpful, but eventually we figured out that each of them was trying to persuade us to buy something from them, or go someplace else or I don’t even know. The one thing that kept coming up was that that particular day was a special day and we should go to a particular temple for the day. Apparently it was only open for one day of the year and that was the day. After all the warnings and the too helpful people we were leery; we didn’t trust any of them. People would get upset with us when we wouldn’t go the direction they thought we should have gone or we didn’t take their advice. It was very strange and disconcerting. At one point we even had a “Security guard” with what appeared to be fake badge try to give us advice. Again, it just didn’t feel right. As we were headed back for the day a police officer approached us and handed us a laminated card with police numbers on it for when we had trouble. He talked about the pick pockets and other unscrupulous people; when he handed us the card it seemed like he was saying “Here, this is for when you need it, not IF you need it”. Great, what had we got ourselves into?? He spoke English fairly well and told us we should go visit this special temple that was only open that day and it wasn’t on our map because it wasn’t a tourist destination.  Crap, him too we thought for a minute. Eventually we came to trust him and decided to visit the “Special temple”. We crammed all five of us in a tuk-tuk. I think three people would have fit comfortably. Tuk-tuk’s are Thailand’s version of taxis. There were traditional taxis, but tuk-tuks were more abundant and easily accessible.

Tuk-tuk

 We arrived at the “Special” temple and realized it was where all the kings of Thailand had been buried. It was only open one day a year to the public. It was open that day because the princess came to pray for her unborn baby.  The other very notable thing about Thailand that I have failed to mention is there is a king. He is much cherished. The current monarch, Bhumibol Adulyadej, is 84 years old and has been the reigning king for 66 years.

Here is one example of many we saw of the king. He looks like a sweet old guy.

 He is the longest living reigning king in the world. He has been sick for quite some time and his son has been making political decisions for him lately, which apparently has created some controversy. There were signs EVERYWHERE with his picture on it; from huge bill boards to small images hanging from all the taxis driver’s rear view mirrors, you name it, the king’s face was on it. They love this guy! Apparently, you can be imprisoned for 15 years for being disrespectful toward the king, but I get the feeling that they really respect and love their leader. It’s so different than the way we think about our leadership in America. 

I cannot remember the name of the “Special” temple and I can’t find it on any tourist websites either and I believe it is because it wasn’t a tourist destination. I think we totally lucked out on the day we were there, in more than one way as you will read. We were greeted by the manager of the temple when we arrived.

This was the manager who posed for a picture with the kids

 The place was pretty much empty, unlike every other place we had been since our arrival in Bangkok. We were unable to enter right away because there was a ceremony or something so the manager sat with us for twenty minutes or so and told us all about the history of that wat. He showed us all the mausoleums where the previous monarchs were buried. 

These are two of the buildings for previous kings

He explained that the princess came that morning to pray for her unborn child and that was why it was open that day  He seemed very eager to practice his English, which he apparently hadn’t used in a couple of years. Finally we were able to enter the inner walls and we were stunned by the beauty of that wat. He spent several hours walking us around and telling us many details about the building.

Mother of pearl and other stones

 Everything was covered in real gold, mother of pearl, stones and hand painted. All of the pictures were individually done and hand painted. I snapped a ton of pictures, but I’m not sure any of them really did it justice. Eventually we are asked by one of the monks (who spoke perfect English and surprised us by answering our questions the manager couldn’t quite understand) if we wanted to witness a confirmation ceremony. We got to enter the very sacred portion of the temple to witness the ceremony.

 The young monk who invited us answered all our questions about the ceremony and his process for becoming a monk.

 He explained that all young men were encouraged to go through the process. It is a sort of coming of age for men around 20. The culture doesn’t expect everyone will stay with it, but that they will have a better understanding of themselves and Buddhism. He explained that they are allowed to carry phones, but they give up all other worldly possessions. They shave their head and all where the same two outfits so they give up their individuality and all look the same.  I was thankful that he approached us and seemed eager to share his experiences.  I was not allowed to stand too close to him and that was for his protection so he isn’t tempted, which also explains why they are not allowed to sit near women, take anything from a women or basically have much interaction with us. One of our flights in Thailand a monk had the entire row of seats to himself and he couldn’t eat or drink anything the entire time because the plane only had female attendants. I am glad we had our informative talk with the other monk so we understood what rules the flying monk was following. There are other rules regarding women too, but I can’t remember them all. It’s just fascinating to learn about other’s cultures and lives.

I find it fascinating that there were shrines everywhere. It seems like every restaurant, every house, every establishment has a shrine out front with offerings to Buddha.

This shows one of the hundreds of shrines that we saw outside people's homes.

The following day we spent visiting a few more temples and taking a long tail boat ride in the canal down to the water market. We see a slice of life that I have never experienced. Many of the houses along the canal are up on posts and I was shocked at how many of them were barely held up.

 Many of them have rotting, leaning pillars. They were many with open air and no windows and barely walls in some cases. I didn’t get any pictures of the really dilapidated ones (or the ones without windows), but here are a few of the ones I did capture.

On our boat ride we had a few other boats approach us trying to sell us their goods.

She was all smiles until we didn't buy anything.

  We saw huge water monitors, up to six feet long. We didn’t know they lived there so that was a bit of a surprise.

Water monitor on the rocks. This is a medium size one. It was a bit of a surprise the first time we saw one.

We were dropped off at the water market for a bit of time to check it out before the rest of our canal ride. Again, new experiences I wasn’t expecting. The first portion of the market is a restaurant, sort of. There are different vendors selling food. Most of the cooking was done in long boats over barbeques on the side of the pier. 

Yummy! They've got multiple bbq's going at the same time. Nice looking water huh?

There were several of them and the food smells fabulous. Everywhere we walk I was tempted by the smells and look of the food. We didn’t want to get sick so we decided to have some fruit that we chose ourselves from one of the little vendors. We also had some very yummy coconut ice cream with nuts and other toppings that are not identifiable, but delicious served in a coconut shell.

 They were feeding the fish and so the fish come in huge schools trying to get the tasty treats all around the dock.

Fishy, fishy, fishy.  Notice the dock. Pretty much what we saw everywhere we went.

 The water was disgusting and many of the vendors were selling fish that had been recently caught from the canal. It really did look delicious. I saw they were washing the dishes in a huge garbage can with cold soapy water. There were no indoor facilities. All of this means we got to admire the food, but not eat it.

The floating dock or pier had many vendors selling their handmade crafts and jewelry. We did enjoy our time looking at all the crafts.

Our final night we decide to take the kids to a Lady boy show…. hmmmm, another new experience. It was a cabriole show with only men who were either in the transition of becoming women or had made the complete transformation. The entire show was lip synced, except the MC who had quite a  masculine voice, but a very shapely body. While it was very entertaining and nothing was inappropriate about the actual show I did question what the kids were thinking and whether it was a good idea to expose them to this. They weren’t the only children there, there were at least three other families with children even younger than mine.  I found myself staring at the performer’s pubic area during most of the show wondering where they hid their packages or who had already had surgery. There were actually a couple of them that I would have never known they weren’t women, they were quite feminine and petite. I found myself also paying attention to their hands, wrist size and general musculature also. Many of them danced quite well. When we were done I asked the boys what they thought and Riley specifically said he was quite “Confused” by the whole thing.

These are a few of the "Ladies".

 He apparently had spent much of the show also staring at their pubic area. I would imagine it is a little confusing for a 13 year old boy just starting to become a man and watching these men give up their masculinity.  After the show we went to one of the local night markets. We went to the “Appropriate” night market (or we were told that anyway) and still had to keep reminding the kids to not look certain directions because there were so many seedy, sleazy shops on the side of the market. We made our way into the center and looked at the crafts for a while and then called it quits. There was obviously a lot of prostitution and from what I was told (I didn’t look in the shops either, I was too busy trying to distract everyone) there are live acts going on with open doors right on to the street (and it wasn’t just dancing!). Bangkok, it’s a unique place.

Final day before we took another plane North to Chiang Mai we decided to check out the Bangkok zoo. It is apparently the best in all of Thailand. I figure it was a nice wholesome thing to do after the previous night’s adventure. The zoo was nice. We saw many animals. The exciting part was a gibbon monkey escaped while we were there. I didn’t know anything about gibbon’s at the time so we went and hid in the caged eating area. Now that I think back I do think it is interesting that the food area is caged, maybe it is to keep the birds out, or maybe this type of things happens more often than not. And I don’t think we needed to hide from the gibbons, but there are other animals that I would want to hid from. No one spoke English so we weren’t really sure what we were supposed to do so we went in and ate lunch. After a while we got bored and decided to go explore the rest of the zoo. Everyone else stayed behind to watch the capture. The zoo staff continued to hunt the monkey with an air gun with a  tranquilizer in the tip. That monkey was amazingly fast, I assume they eventually caught it.

Here are the zoo keepers trying to capture the monkey. You can see the man on the left is pumping up the air gun.

I know this was a long post, it was three days’ worth of exploring. Thanks for reading.

 Overall I am glad we went to Bangkok, but it is one of those places I have no desire to revisit. I found it stressful and I was always worried someone was trying to trick us or steal our money. I was never worried about my personal safety, but you can only see so many videos of pick pockets or scooter drive bys taking your purse before you start to feel vulnerable (these videos are shown on animated bill boards all over the city).

This is the sign in the taxi on the way to the airport. It pretty much sums up my impression of Bangkok.

I don’t believe in Science, Only Love, Sex, and Myself

     Hello this is Aiden Bernhardt again, I am glad to say that our family finally apprehended the madmen writing those threatening words in the comments section of my previous post. If you did not comprehend a word I just said, that is most likely because you are unfamiliar with the drama that unfolded in the comments section after I posted that story. If that is the case I advise you pay a trip after reading this entry, to the comments section of my previous entry: The Italian Kitchen at the Bowl. After examining the video evidence and backtracking Steven’s IP address, we discovered the location of this villain’s evil lair. He lived in: Shanghai, XuJiaHui, Shama complex, room 1706.
    
     Well, it turns out that the whole thing was a cleverly constructed prank that my dad pulled over all our heads. Not only did he create a fake email account for, and pretend to be the monkey expert from the rare earth animal society, but he was also the private detective person that Steven hired to “track” our family down. Well done Dad. Well done.

     Anyway, what I really want to talk about is fashion. Everyone knows that I am a very, Very, VERY fashion sensitive person. And rightly so, because I believe that what you wear is what you are. For instance, If I were to wear a t-shirt with the words:

          I don’t believe in Science. Only Love, Sex, and myself.


…Then that would be a very straightforward way of letting everyone I meet know exactly what I’m interested in. Ok, jokes aside, I was inspired to write this entry after catching sight of a college aged kid in the subway wearing this particular slogan on his shirt. It was too funny to pass by, so after whipping out a notepad I ended up writing down every single humorous T-shirt I saw for the rest of the day. Somehow in the fashion trends of China, It has become incredibly popular to wear T-shirts with various English phrases printed on them. However, as most of the people wearing these shirts do not speak English reasonably well themselves, they rarely have any idea what it is they are wearing. The words could be a random string of letters for all they care; What matters most to them seems to be the fact that it HAS English written on it in some form or another. The result is a great diversification of what is acceptable English spelling, and also the creation of hilarious phrases that are nonsensical, and occasionally ironic. I am going to stop talking now because I don’t want to spoil the following humor by telling you why the jokes are funny (turns out that’s the best way to ruin a joke (unless of course you are doing it on purpose, then it’s funny (but then again it’s really only funny to you (almost as funny as typing four parentheses in a row)))). Enjoy these T-shirt slogans that I hastily scrawled onto a back page of my sister’s private journal:

          I live for Party Rock. (worn by a plump middle aged woman)

          The filth and the furry fight alone.


          Meals struck to float.


          Death. Deadly. Murderer. (bloody shirt worn by innocent two year old)

          ABCFM LLTZNOCK EDIO QNVMDSN QPVNCM


          A world without strangers <3 (pink shirt. Worn by a hunchbacked, grumpy looking, elderly lady)

          Life is about cheating yourself. (On a really fat guy)

          Go Dunk Yourself


          Blue note Rhapsody it may on key board instruments Involve a glide either upward or                       downward this flatness may take several forms.


And of course, my favorite:
          LOUISIANA. The state located in the southern region.

     Well that’s all for now. We’re going to be taking a vacation in Thailand for the next two weeks, so I suppose you’ll be hearing about that next. Buh bye now. -Aiden

City Noise

There is a constant chatter of noises here in the city. Much of it is honking either by bikes, scooters or various types of motor vehicles. At first it is quite overwhelming, but after some time you learn to tune out what isn’t important to you at any given moment. I had been trying to figure out why this trip to Shanghai hasn’t been quite as overwhelming as far as street noise and understanding traffic. At first I thought maybe the streets were calmer or maybe less noisy, but what I really realized is that I have become seasoned, the noise is the same. What I really realized is that the street noise is much like a new babies cry. There are different cries for different needs. When you bring your first baby home it is all just noise that you feel helpless to understand and after a bit of time desperately trying to understand you start to get it. There are different cries for being hungry, being uncomfortable, wanting attention, really hurting, the list goes on. With each new baby you bring home the process is quicker, still a learning process because the dialect is slightly different, but nevertheless you learn what each cry means. Honking in the city is no different. There is constant communication going on and at first there is a great desire to want to know what it all means. Then slowly it unravels short, quick honks mean “Here I am, watch out for me”, short, a bit more forceful honks mean “Watch out I’m coming through” and the loud, long, forceful honks mean “Get the heck out of my way because you have 2 seconds and I’m going to crash into you!!”. It’s really pretty easy. The scooters know it, the bikes know it and now I do too. I am a seasoned parent and a somewhat seasoned traffic obeyer. 

The Bowl's Italian Kitchen by Aiden

The Bowl's Italian Kitchen
    Hello, this is Aiden Bernhardt. If by some chance you have stumbled upon this blog without prior acquaintance of its writer, or you have so far neglected to read more than the first few words of every post, then you will be delighted to learn that Hollie is currently the mother of two Brazilian monkeys and a teenage boy (me). While in all appearances, the two monkeys very closely resemble human children, I assure you that their existence would be against the law. If those two monkeys were to somehow transform into human children, then sadly, our membership at the swimming pool across the street would no longer be valid. At the Spartan Club where said pool resides, the formula for a packaged family discount only has three ingredients: one mother, one father, one child. Thus the existence of our species-diverse family.
    I should mention that monkeys seem to exhibit a certain fondness for cheap Canadian pizza bought at high-end cafeterias. Thankfully, there is such a shop located in our beloved watering hole, Metro City, AKA The bowl. On our most recent expedition, we got lucky and spotted the rare human being prowling amongst the foliage and… err I mean we learned that the guys running the Italian Kitchen restaurant were extremely pleasant Canadians who had gone out of their way to make life hard for themselves by moving their startup business to China. Currently they are still in the process of convincing the locals that Pizza and Italian pasta (with cheese) are real foods that you can eat. The owner of the shop named Stu, sat and ate lunch with us while we traded experiences. We learned a lot from Stu, to say the least. Bear with me now as I will attempt to summarize what we learned in three words of no particular order: Soapy, Punches, Money. There, I said it. In case you are too ignorant to understand the depth of what I have just said, here is a more in-depth description of each word:
    Soapy: On our last visit to China, We stayed very near where our current home is, and we ate lunch at the bowl nearly every day. When however my mother realized that the bowl is possibly the filthiest place you could ever order food, we stopped going for lunch. This time when we returned to China, we visited the bowl hesitantly only to discover that the place was a lot cleaner. For instance, my mother noticed that our plates and bowls were now regularly handed to us already cleaned via the magical process of soap and hot water, (something they never used to do, clean the dishes for god’s sake) Stu explained to us that this was all thanks to him. When he and his brother started up business in the empty shop near the elevator three months ago, they revolutionized the entire place by cleaning their dishes. Soon all the other shops regretfully had to rise to this new standard. Upon looking around we noticed there was even soap in the mop buckets, what a concept.
    Punches: Stu told us briefly about an incident in which he lightly pushed a mall guard on the shoulder and promptly “Killed him”. He and his brother’s girl friend were shopping at the mall near closing time when they discovered that all the doors had been closed. Their only way out was to pass by a guard with a napoleon complex. He told them that “His” exit was not supposed to be used. They tried exiting anyway, and the guard got right in Stu’s face and told him that he was going to kill his girlfriend next time he saw them. Stu pushed the guard a little (it was documented with a security camera). The guard was apparently a fan of soccer because he keeled over clutching his knee and screaming in pain. The police showed up and dragged Stu away to jail. After examining the evidence, the police let him off, but told him not to be so strong in the future, and that it was ok to spit in his face and tell him you were going to kill him, but never ever was it ok to touch someone else.
    Money: One of the most enlightening things Stu enlightened to us was the existence of a strict social caste system based on money. Similar to the one used in India, except tucked away, the caste system in China allows the richest of its members to mostly do whatever the hell they want without retribution. That is, as long as they have contacts in high places, and they have lots of money (obviously). Stu said that the difficulty level for setting up a business in China is turned all the way up to Expert. By coming in to the country afresh, you have no contacts to help you cut through the complicated bureaucracy, and therefore no chance what so ever. The only way they got their business running in the first place was by reaching through a long grape vine of people to the owner of the Bowl, who in one night gave them their shop front in the bowl after nine months of failed leads. It wasn’t exactly the style of restaurant they had been searching all that time for, but they settled. Thanks to them, we can buy pizza for the monkeys whenever they become restless. Well that’s all for now from me.
    Tune in next week, maybe. -Aiden

Differences between Seattle and Shanghai by Riley

Differences between Seattle and Shanghai

By Riley

6/29/2012

Our driver takes us to a fast food restaurant for lunch one day, we walk in and there is no English on the menu. Aiden is trying to figure out what they all mean and I’m using my mom’s phone to translate it.  Aiden is getting almost all of it right, but there are some really weird characters that he cannot figure out. So I use the translator and it comes up with something that’s not even food. So Aiden tries to go to the front and asks for a English menu “我们可以有一个美国的菜, they don’t have any in the restaurant. We turn around worried that our driver took off and will be back in an hour and we don’t know what to order. Just then this really nice lady, who is Chinese but lives in Canada, walks up to us and helps us find our food we want, then she is nice enough to even order for us. She was our savior for the day!   We walk over to an open table right in front of where our food comes out of.  So we are eating all happily, then a guy who has been sitting behind us the whole entire time started drinking his soup. He wasn’t just drinking his soup, he was slurping it, it was so loud and gross, my mom couldn’t stand the slurping and she couldn’t eat while he was making the slurping sounds.  It went on for about 2 minutes, then I turned around and looked at his soup bowl and then I turned back to my mom and said, “ Don’t worry he’s almost done”. 

 Then at another meal we had at the “Dome” (my whole family likes to call it that because it looks like a dome) but it’s really called Metro City. 

My mom and Aiden were talking to this really nice guy named Stu who owns a restaurant in the “ Dome”.  While they were talking I saw 3 people, 2 guys and one lady sitting at a table behind my mom and they all look like they didn’t know each other. One of the guys ate all of his food, but then once he is done with his food he waited at the table.  Then the lady walks away because she’s full, but the guy I have been watching wasn't. He swooped over once she left and started eating her food. He was sitting right next to a see through window that was right next to the escalator. The lady whose food the guy was eating walked by and looked at him and gave this really disgusted look at him.  Then once the other guy was done he did the same thing, started eating his food, but he didn’t go down the escalator so he didn’t see the guy eating his food.  Once he was done eating everyone else’s food he got up and started practicing kick boxing in the hall way. 

So now we move on to the people on the street, people don’t have the same customs that we do in the US. The thing that is most disgusting is they spit big, huge loogies out everywhere! It makes my mom and I look around and try not to step on them. We also look at each other and have this really disturbed look on our faces every time. 

Then there’s a lot of beggars that look so miserable I feel so bad for them, but I don’t have money on me whenever I see them so I can’t give money to them, but I really want to!!!! In the US you would rarely ever see people on the side of the road with no legs and missing one arm. It’s so sad that their in this position and I can’t do anything to help, it’s so sad.

This is a picture of a mother and son that have no where to live and sleep right there on the road.

Last time I was in Shanghai there was this father and son that looked like they were in a fire and burned badly and now they’re homeless and have no money. I wish there was something I could do.

We found the China that we remember…

We went for dinner tonight away from the apartment towards an area that we used to eat at when we were here four years ago. It’s probably only about half a mile from our current apartment, but clearly all the things that I have been making mental notes about that have changed, have not changed when you get off the beaten track a bit. This particular restaurant is called the Big Frog and every time we tried to go 4 years ago it was too busy and we couldn’t get in. Tonight was no exception, the place was packed. In fact, we waited for quite a while for a seat. Once it was finally our turn we followed the waiter upstairs to a room that was so filled with smoke that you could cook meat in it. Ah, the China I remember. We know that it can be different now so we asked to be moved to another table because it was too smokey. Now remember that I told you this was the old China, which also means that no one speaks any English, none, notta. After a bit of sign language we were lead downstairs and out the front door. Today was a rather warm day, so it was still quite warm tonight. There were some temporary tables set up in front of the restaurant for the abundance of patrons they had tonight. There wasn’t a table available outside either so they ran back inside, found a disassembled plastic table and set it up for us, followed by some plastic chairs. So now we have a place to sit and eat, but it is on an extremely busy, smelly, and noisy darkish street, but it is slightly better than the room filled with so much smoke that you couldn’t see clearly across the room.

Now it’s time to order our food. There is no English on the menu, not a single picture on the menu and no idea what they have except probably frog since it’s called the Big Frog (which isn’t in English either, but we recognize the symbol for frog). Oh and large pans full of Cray fish. Everyone around us is wearing plastic gloves and diving elbow deep into giant piles of Cray fish. I just can’t do Cray Fish in such a polluted place so we’ve got to figure something else out since we have now waited forever, had them set up a special table for us and besides the fact we are starving. Our waitress hands us a menu, stands and stares waiting for us to make a decision. We try to tell her that we need time, but she doesn’t get it so we let her stand there. She doesn’t speak any English and we try with our little bit of mandarin to figure it out and mostly it’s an awkward interaction. Finally Aiden asks her in Mandarin what she would order. She points to a few items on the menu that are completely in Chinese characters. Jeff tries to use his phone to translate the menu items, but it’s so dark that his phone is having issues. We finally decide on a few things with the waitress, not really knowing for sure what we are ordering. Our first item arrives. The phone has translated that it is some sort of golden, needle mushrooms. We have had these mushrooms before and really enjoyed them. The item that arrives might have had a few mushrooms in it, but mostly it is tripe. Tripe is cow intestine. And not only is it tripe, but it is SUPER spicy. Hmmmm, maybe the next item will be more in line with what we are expecting.  The next item is a soup with some sort of meat in it, probably beef, and noodles. It is also SUPER spicy, but with plenty of water it is consumed. Last item to arrive is a HUGE bowl with enormous fried frog parts. These must be the biggest bull frogs imaginable.

This is Claire holding up a frog leg, yummy! Notice the "Blond" Chinese lady behind Claire. We see that a lot here. Sad since they have such beautiful black hair, this orange color is not appealing to me.

 The kids said they saw a delivery of frogs and the frogs were plate size. I try to imagine my food was never alive so I do not look at the delivery.  This is perhaps the oddest concoction of ingredients that I could imagine; fried frog, sliced lotus roots and potato chips. Yes, you read that right, potato chips. Not the rippled sort, but the smooth, salted thick ones (like Tim’s Cascade potato chips).  This is super yummy!

This meal is nostalgic of most of our China experiences 4 years ago. I have another post written, but I haven’t posted it yet about all the amazing changes that we have seen in Shanghai. When I post that entry you will appreciate how far parts of Shanghai have come in a very short time. For now we enjoyed another adventure of not knowing for sure what we have eaten and eating things that we might not have normally ordered. The little things you take for granted when you are home. 

This picture is dark and we had eaten a lot of it when I thought to take a picture, but you can see the round, holey things those are lotus root slices. The flat, cream colored things at the top are potato chips. We have seen this dish at other restaurants, but we didn't know what it was until it was our turn to eat it.

What a typical day in Shanghai looks like:

I thought I would share with you a typical day here for us in Shanghai. We started out today by heading to the store to buy eye glasses for Aiden and I. We had Yang, our driver take us to the same place we went four years ago when we were here. It turns out that it isn’t where it used to be. After an hour and a half driving through crazy, busy traffic our driver got us to where he thought the Eye Glass Emporium used to be. L  (I saved a business card from before)Yang called the business and they explained where they had moved. He drove us to near the new location, but he couldn’t explain where it was exactly so after a little while of him telling me to wait, but not really knowing what for, a young woman came out of one of the buildings and waved at us. She apparently had come from the business to escort us to her store. We followed her through a quick mart type store, up three flights in the elevator and ended up in a very busy store full of many eye glass vendors.

This is one little shop in a large building FULL of different glasses stores.

 The young ladytook us to the owner of the store and she greeted us very warmly. She speaks very good English and obviously after looking around has a market on Westerners because there were several other Western clienteles besides us.  She and Aiden picked out a pair of glasses, and then it was my turn and finally Claire decided she really wanted a pair of sunglasses. Claire didn’t like any of the kid’s sunglasses as she had her heart set on an oversized set of adult glasses. So after a lot of deliberating about which ones might be more appropriate Claire picked out some oversized, reddish glasses. Here she is in her glasses before we added the shaded lenses.

While Claire was picking out her glasses, our glasses were being made. The frames are already made, but the technician shaped the lenses. He is done in about 20 minutes, so amazing to me even though I experienced this last time too.

Here's Riley trying on some beautiful purple ladies glasses, he's such a goof. :)

 By now we are starving and it turns out it’s going to take a while for them to get to Claire’s glasses so they suggest we go eat. We have no idea where we are or where to go so the owner of the glasses place suggests her worker again escort us to a nearby restaurant and then she will bring our glasses when they are done. We head back down the elevator and find a simple little restaurant and while we are eating our glasses show up. This so cool and such great service and all for about $115.  The $115 includes replacing the lenses in Aiden’s old glasses too. J

Then instead of being stuck in the car for another hour drive home we jumped on the subway and got to our stop in about 15 minutes. The driver is nice, but when you need to get somewhere quick it turns out the subway is probably quicker unless there is no traffic

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After our glasses adventure Claire and I decide to go have pedicures. Claire has been dying to have one since she recently missed out on an opportunity to go for my niece’s birthday. I asked the nice ladies at the front desk of the apartment where they would recommend and after a few minutes of me trying to describe a pedicure with sign language they recommended a nice place up the street. They wrote out the Chinese characters on a piece of paper. Then Claire and I set out on our quest to find this place with the unknown sign. We weren’t even really sure which street it was on. I stopped in a few stores and showed them my note and people kept pointing me in a similar direction and eventually we found it. This place was very small, not in any way luxurious, had an incredibly strong chemical smell, but did pedicures. Good enough! When they seated us, there was a little English, but not much. But the patron next to me spoke pretty good English so I had her interpret as much as I could without ruining her experience. At first they said they couldn’t do Claire because she was a kid, but when they saw how sad and disappointed she looked they changed their mind. She went first and had a very content look on her face, like she had joined some lady club that she had been yearning after for years.

 Then it was my turn. They did a nice job, it wasn’t your spa pedicure with all the massaging and scrubbing, but I have some pretty toes now. I guess I had to ask for the extras. I’m learning, it’s taking me awhile.

Next it was time for dinner with Jeff. We walked down the street to a Muslim, Uighur restaurant. It was a mix of Chinese and Persian style food. We had lamb, eggplant, green beans, and beef with yogurt. Super yummy, I think we will have to check out that place again as there were many really good looking things on the menu. Every time we have tried to go to this place it has been so busy that people are spilled out onto the street. We figured a Monday night was probably our best chance and it was. The one disappointment was there were no belly dancers today. Riley in particular was looking forward to them.

On our walk home Claire wanted to take a side trip to a little court yard near our apartment where some feral and not feral cats live. This side trip happens several times a day, nearly every time we leave or return to our apartment. There is a momma cat and four babies that we can’t get close to and then there is one brown kitty that always greets Claire when she goes to “Check” on the kitties. Here is a picture of Claire and her friend. 

The sad thing is most people here do not like cats so they are not nice to them. They look appalled that Claire is petting this cat (She always goes back and washes her hands). We have watched some of the other young children playing in the court yard and they will call the kitty over and then yell at it in a really mean way. It some ways I think Claire is doing this cat a disservice to be nice to it because it trusts Claire, but shouldn’t trust these other children and I am afraid it might get hurt. L

The last thing that I was going to mention about our walk home from the court yard tonight is the court yard is overlooked by a rather fancy restaurant. I have not gone into this restaurant, but it looks like from the court yard that there are many private rooms with one large round table in each room. Usually we are preoccupied by the kitties and I don’t pay any attention to the restaurant, but tonight one waitress caught my attention. She was clearing the table and kept taking bites of some dish that was left. She thought no one was watching her. I could tell by the way she kept looking out the door to see if anyone could see her, but I could see her from outside. She was acting nervous, but kept taking more and more bites. I have never been a waitress, but I don’t think it would ever occur to me to touch someone else’s uneaten food. I know it’s a little different here because every meal is served family style. Family style means that all the food is kept in the center of the table and each person uses their own chop sticks to take a small portion and put it directly in their mouth. Your personal bowl and plate are really only there for bones or other inedible pieces. Maybe her behavior isn’t odd and maybe I was misreading her nervousness, but it seemed a little odd, or maybe it’s just a perk for a food server. Either way the food she was stealing couldn’t possibly be as good as our dinner.