No Eating in the Car: May 2007

Friends on the slide :)

I love the sand! Can't wait for the beach!

Our garden continues to grow. The sunflowers and corn are now taller than the kids. Last weekend we had a couple of really hot days and I forgot to water.... so a couple of the plants that have been struggling along didn't make it... ;(
We have eaten some of our beans and eat the basil often!

Here we are watching the show. Can't believe my hair is that dark!!

For the grande finale the entire school, minus the 4 high school kids, all got up and sang a beautiful song about miracles. The basic message was that miracles still happen, all you have to do is look around and appreciate the miracles around you. Marlo is in the pink in front and Zoe is up two rows behind her.

Zoe's class sang a song with actions... "going over, going under, stand attention like a soldier with a 1, 2, 3... going over the sea"

They also did a dance and sang... they were very "cool".

This is Marlo's entire class minus 1 girl and 1 boy.

Marlo's class performed a song with bells. It was quite complicated and we were very impressed.

Fan Dancing

More fan dancing.

Last Friday night the school had their end of the year talent show. Marlo performed a fan dance with some of the other girls. She is the front left.

Last Fri. night we had some friends over for dinner around the pool. It has been in the 90's on and off lately with even a little sunshine. We are already enjoying the summer.

In true boy style one of Teac's favorite past times is pushing his cars around on the floor. And as everyone knows you need a small car with good gas mileage and a big convertable for the weekends. I don't think he's too concerned about color yet.

"Look at me, I'm so big I can even climb all the way up onto the window ledge!"

I like this picture because it shows so many of the towers dotted accross the landscape.

Traveling further down the road, we saw this village accross the river built into the side of the mountain. From our lookout point you could pay a small fee and have your picture taken with some of the local girls dressed in traditional clothing.

The only road went straight threw this town. The buildings all along the street were impecibly painted and modern looking. One turn to the right or left would but you back into reality. They painted the shop door ways to look like Tibetan style doors and some of the sides of the buildings had huge murals on them.

Another prayer tower. I'm still not sure what they are really called. We saw so many of them along the way. At one of them we saw an older woman walking around the tower in traditional dress, spinning her prayer wheel, while 3 younger women followed her.

This is a close-up of the town. The architecture is very different from Chinese. The symbols which look like a backwards swastica were mistaken by some of the first americans to enter Tibet during WWII as a mark of their alliance with Germany. That was not the case.

This is a small village. The tall tower was supposedly used for communication between villages, or some say for protection when raiding bands came through. It has been partially restored and is now used as a tourist attraction along the road.

Although still part of the Sichuan province, this side of the mountain is all Tibetan people. Most of the signs are in Tibetan sometimes with Chinese underneath. The white towers on the top of the hill are used for praying.

After arriving at 8pm we spent the night in a small hotel with no heat. Both the boys had a cold and so after coughing and not sleeping all night, we decided we had better head back... only not the way we came! That road is a once-in-a-life-time experience. We headed west so that we could make another loop back. Along the way we passed this marker which remembers the Chinese communits' army that marched this way.

This is what it looked like at the top where we saw the yaks. "Nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live here."

Here we are at over 15,000 feet, the average height of the Himalayan range. No trees to be seen... the only vegitation is small grasses. We saw some Yaks and it was snowing so we got out and took some video..... we forgot any kind of winter gear and it was COLD! The road down below was the way we had to go to get to the nearest hotel to stay the night. We dropped 1000 feet or so before stopping, but it was still cold! No one seemed to have any problems with the altitude thank goodness. I think it helped that we weren't trying to climb the mountain, only sit in the car and drive over it.

Climbing higher into the mountains... 14,000 feet.

Those are the Himalayas to the north west of Chengdu. We are close to 13,000 feet high when we took this picture. Notice the lack of trees. :)

This is one of the good parts of the road we drove on. They carved this amazing road through the mountains but all of it seemed to be under construction at the same time... 12 hours through the mountains on a road under construction was not a good time.

This is one of the canyons we saw on our way up through to the Himalayas.

Panda Rescue- Unfortunately the pandas are running out of land. We have yet to travel anywhere in China that isn't dotted with people- except the Tibetan Plateau, and I think there aren't people there because they just can't be.

We saw pandas at the Wolong Panda Research Center. Our Ayi kept saying how they look so dirty in real life compared to the cute black and white pictures you see everywhere.

Our garden is growing... and this was taken two weeks ago!

What does it mean when your culture is intangible?

My battery was dying and it was pouring rain but this is a picture of Zoe with an 18 mos. old tiger and lion. They wanted so badly for someone to come in an play with them. In the cage just a few over, they had 5 mos. olds... so beautiful and you could be so close, it was a little scary. The real scary part was that it was 4:30 pm and a storm had rolled in. We were getting soaked and the zoo was designed in a maze that would never let you out. No matter how hard we tried or who we asked, there seemed to be no direct route out of the place... just up and down more stairs with our baby in the stroller getting soaked. That was frustrating. To add to that, it was $12 per adult to get in, the kids were free, and you still had to pay if you wanted to do anything else... see a performance, park your car, feed the animals, take a picture with a monkey....are you sure they're not capitalists?