我們還在這裏 We’re still here!

We’ve all been really busy over the last few months, but we’re still around. Maybe I should just continue with photo blogs like some others. I’ll have to think about it. Well, where do I start 怎麼開始寫? Maybe accomplishments would be the right place.

In the local public school our daughter attended just outside of Taipei, she received a score that was 3rd in her class in math 得了第三名. Remember that this was taken in Chinese. And I was worried that she hadn’t learned anything up to this point! Our little boy is able to do simple arithmetic problems, which is not bad for his age 他會做簡單的加法. Also, he has a girlfriend, many it seems. More on that in future posts.

The first photo was taken of our son at the pumpkin festival. The second photo is of my wife in front of a retreat high up in the mountains of central Taiwan 第二張是在台灣的天池拍的.

The Days Before Christmas 聖誕節的前幾天

There are some things which have impressed me 給我最深刻的印象 this Christmas season. The first is that of my wife and daughter line dancing to Feliz Navidad. My wife likes to dance traditional dances with steps and does it pretty well 我的太太喜歡跳舞. As for me, I have never been that coordinated. It is “1, 2, 3, step on her toes 踩她的腳. 4. 5, 6, kick her in the shins 踢她的腳. 7, 8, 9 trip and fall over the chairs and fall into the couple next to me, etc.” Her workplace had a Christmas party and her coworkers agreed to dance for the workplace.

Another impression is that of our little son asking “is it Christmas yet?” “聖誕節到了沒有?” every couple of minutes. “No, it’s not December 25 yet, just a couple more days.” After another 20 minutes 過了二十分鐘, “is it Christmas yet?” Anticipation is a wonderful thing!

Another impression is that of our little son smearing peanut butter 小兒子把花生醬擦在壽司上 onto the vinegared rice and seaweed of a maki roll that we, a Chinese and American couple, borrowed from Japanese 日本 and Korean 韓國 cuisine. Now, that is a hybrid combination worthy of the child of a cross-cultural couple!

(The 2nd photo, which has nothing to do with any of this, was of our recent Christmas party where we somehow fed 25 people.)

Milk Tea 奶茶 2

I don’t yet know much about Uighar culture 維族 except that they are a central Asian people group from a dry and starkly beautiful land. We returned to our pickup point at the late hour of 7:00 a.m. to discover a restaurant serving Mongolian breakfast food had already opened. That is where we enjoyed our first cup of Mongolian milk tea 蒙古奶茶.

Why care about milk tea 為什麼提出奶茶呢? Well, it’s interesting to me to see how cultures spread. Unlike Chinese, Mongolians drink milk tea and they drink it out of glasses 玻璃杯子 rather than tea cups. This is the same as the way Russians 俄國人 like to drink their tea.

In fact, it is the way my ancestors 我的祖先也是這樣喝茶的, who were Germanic peoples settled in Russia drank their tea. A group of Mongolians early in the Manchu dynasty moved en masse east 1000s of miles to around the Volga River 伏爾加河. With their wagon trains and ponies, paintings of these settlers made me think of the American West. After carefully looking at photos of my grandfather I suspect 可能有蒙古血統 that one of our relatives way back married one of these settlers.

Milk Tea 奶茶

There is nothing quite like drinking steaming hot salted milk tea 冷冰冰的清晨喝鹹奶茶很舒服 that I am drinking in the chill of the morning. As I think I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I’m not a morning person 我不是早鳥 and so anything to relieve the strange combination of grogginess and super sharp awareness of the early morning feels really good.

I am drinking the milk tea we got in Inner Mongolia 內蒙古. We had just been kicked out of bed and gotten off the overnight train from our home in Beijing at Hohhot 呼和浩特市 at 5:00 in the morning. Nothing was open. It was cold, very cold. We eventually found a kindly taxi driver 有人带我們去who took us to a Xinjiang 新疆 餐廳(Uighar) restaurant that was open. The Uighar 維族 peoples who are apparently early risers. We went to the restaurant you see in this second photo which served Halal food since the Uighars are Islamic回教徒 .

We’re online again 電腦修好了

My hard drive is back and running. After having lost the use of my PC for a while due to some nasty malware problems 惡意軟體的問題, I realize just how dependent I am on it 很依靠電腦. I can live without television 不需要電視. I can live without the radio 不需要收音機. I can even live without telephones 連電話也不需要, but don’t take away my PC. Always back up. Always back up. Always back up.

Fortunately, all of my photos were saved so I’ll have some interesting things to share with you in the coming weeks. These are the crop of persimmons 柿子 we picked from our tree 我們家裡擇的水果. It doesn’t look like a big tree, but as you can see, it yielded a lot. Persimmons are wonderful fruits that last for a long time after picking. They are also good when they are dried. My wife peels the skin 太太喜歡剝皮, but as a barbarian I prefer just to bite into the whole fruit.

Name Brands 名牌

I admit. I am not a name brand type of guy. 我承認,我不瞭解名牌 To me, my type of name brand is the equivalent of (for American readers) Payless Shoes and 99 Cent store. I just don’t see the point of them. Especially in fashion, name brands are exactly the same as some lesser known brand. My wife disagrees.

Asian cultures tend to be name brand conscious for public products that are shown to each other. As the economy of Mainland China has improved, it has jumped right into the name brand fashion craze. In this spirit, my wife was recently researching the best name brand eyeglass frames 太太研究了名牌眼鏡框, which I could not help her with since I did not even know there were name brand eyeglass frames.

My daughter’s ballet school has a group of fairly affluent Chinese housewives who are nice people and interesting to watch interact as a group. My wife was listening as they were discussing expensive name brand purses they had bought and what a good investment they were. “They can only go up in value,” one young woman chirpily said. “I’ve bought several.” 女兒芭蕾舞的班家庭主婦講說了人家應該把名牌皮包當作
投資來看 My wife asked her a question about which name brand eyeglasses were best and received a patient explanation of the kind a child might receive when asking the first time about table manners.

(Like Chevy Nova or "no go" in Mexico, the name brand in the photo needs a little more careful thought if they're going to market cross-culturally.)

Air Pollution 空氣污染

We’ve been enjoying good old-fashioned sooty air pollution on both sides of the Pacific this year. Living in Beijing, we get day after day of air pollution that is common in a big city in a valley surrounded by mountains in a developing economy. Sounds similar to Southern California, doesn’t it? Actually, it isn’t too bad, a lot better than capital cities of some nations, but it could be improved. Some days are a little gray, but I have even seen beautiful blue sky 北京有時候也有藍藍的天空 on occasion as when we were at 潘家园 the wholesale tea marketplace. They are worried about pollution affecting the Olympics in 2008會影響奧運 and so have moved a lot of heavy industry out of the city, but the pollution comes mainly from automobiles at this point. …another similarity to Southern California which I’ll talk about in coming weeks so stick around.

Southern California is now also enjoying major air pollution because of an especially serious round of brush fires 火災. There are fires all around the LA basin, Orange County and especially serious in San Diego….our cell group at church has been praying for the people who have lost their homes. And now that the worst of the fires have died down, I can see in the media that finger-pointing season has begun 責備的時間到了.