Preschoolers and Retired Old Men

Wednesday:
This is Canaan and her friend Yuan Jing Ling.  Her mom is the head gardener here at our apt complex.  They play together all the time even though Canaan speaks very little Chinese and half the time what she does speak she is just making up as she goes along.  The one thing Canaan does know is Chinese nursery rhymes.  She hears Nya singing them all the time.  So half the time her and Jing Ling just sit and color or sit and play with dolls while singing nursery rhymes.  It's cute.  

This is Canaan and her friend at her friend's preschool performance.  After going to their class room to see their work, there was a performance.  At the last minute they asked Canaan to be in the performance (even though I am sure the other 300 kidsd had been practicing for weeks on end.)  She carried a flag in the opening ceremony kind of thing.  Jing Ling goes to the Minority Preschool in town so the performance was really fun.  Everyone was dressed in traditional minority dresses and did traditional dances.  There were over 15 minorities represented.  

Here is Nya with her Chinese teacher.  The older two kids have class every M, T, W.  Give it time and they will be able to write from memory more characters than I can!  

I came home today to find these guys in the pagoda nearest our house.  These guys are northerners.  Rich northerners.  They come to our town from October 1st (national day) to mid April (water splashing festival) to escape the cold of Beijing and Harbin.  There are also a few Shang Hai’ers here as well.  They meet everyday around 3 in our pagoda to practice.  The women dance, the men play their instruments.  Altogether there are about 15 of them.  It’s lovely.  It’s my favorite time of the day.

While hanging out with the Northerners, I noticed the farmers in the field behind my house.  I thought maybe that wasn’t what folks would picture being behind a huge apt complex in the city.  But there are fields like this scattered all over.  You can even see the banana trees in the background.   We've had the chance recently to be going out to the farm alot where Spencer has built his aquaponics system.  It's about 15 minutes outside the city.  It's a friends farm.  They are raising fish and pigs and have several veggie plots as well.  It's been so nice to let the kids tromp around.  The other day when we dropped in they were neutering 20 piglets.  I'll just say there's a certain kind of education you get growing up on a farm that you dont get in the city.  My kids were shocked.  Stood there eyes glued of course, but in shock.  They've recovered now.  One day when we went out to the farm, they had been drying corn kernels for the pigs to eat.  It was done and they were needing to bag it up.  The kids and I helped.  Again, getting dirty and really working with your hands doesnt happen much with city/apt living.  It was good for all of us.   

This area is full of folks that practice Theravada Buddhism.  Here is a monk I caught on a motorcycle today.  We live out by the temple/school so it is not uncommon to see monks outside our gate every day. 

We went to Nya’s favorite noodle shop today.  Here she is.  I should take this time to say that there are a handleful of muslims in our town as well.  Their noodle shops are the best!  There's a teeny bit of arabic on the sign you'll notice.  

I think I mentioned earlier that we live in a Dai autonomous prefecture.  Not sure entirely what that means other than that while they still submit to the Chinese gov’t, they do have some amount of autonomy.  In our city it is required that every sign - street sign, business sign - have Dai written on it first, then Chinese under that.  You can see here that on some of the street signs they also put the pinyin (romanized pronunciation of the transliterated Chinese characters). 

Thursday will feature homeschool, tae kwon do and homecoming mums.