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With our big move out to western China looming before us, we
decided to make a trip to a part of southern China that is known for having one
of the more unique landscapes in all the world.
One of the top tourist attractions here in China is a place called
Guilin, and it is in this outdoor-lover’s paradise that we spent our week of
spring break—complete with the company of Nana (my mom who came in town from
Dallas to visit)!
It was truly a week
jam-packed full of fun experiences and memory-making moments.
A new train line has just been opened that
allowed us to go to Guilin from Beijing in just 10 ½ hours (rather than the
23-hour train ride that was previously required).
We started off by spending a night in Beijing
(we had an early train that didn’t allow us enough time to get the 3 hour’s
travel required to make it from Tianjin to Beijing), during which time I was
also able to take Noah into the international hospital to see the ENT and have
his ears checked.
We’d asked the school
to do a more in-depth hearing check on him, as he regularly speaks at a high
volume and oftentimes seems to not hear us when we are speaking to him in a
normal voice (rather than the yelling that he also hears sometimes!
Haha…just kidding.)
We were somewhat to relieved to discover that
he does not having a degenerative hearing problem, nor is he only “selectively
hearing” his parents and their instructions, but he had a wax build-up problem,
due to what we think is a combination of his gene pool and the pollution that
we experience to such an intense degree here.
After getting worked on for an hour and a half at the doctor’s office,
Noah emerged (still smiling and informing me that he was doing “just great!”)
with his ears pretty much cleaned out and his hearing test results being much
more on the “normal” scale.
The next day was spent on the train—all day!
But how nice it was to be traveling that
distance in a train that allows for more movement and getting up and down and
walking between the cars rather than flights on airplanes that we are used to,
which have much more restricted movement.
The only mishaps we experienced were our two taxis getting separated in
our trip from the hotel to the train station (one went to the south entrance
while the other went to the north), resulting in us almost missing the train
due to how long it took our family to get re-united and through the correct
entrance to our train platform.
In the
midst of the rush and chaos, I didn’t get to purchase the instant noodles or
the McDonalds that I planned to have for our breakfast and lunch; so we had a
long trip with VERY little to eat along the way!
I had luckily packed a stash of granola bars
which were polished off almost completely just on our train ride there, leaving
little for the rest of the week like I’d originally planned.
But I was thankful that my crew has grown so
flexible that they can get by on pretty little and with relatively little
complaining in the process!
We have intentionally waited to do much travel within China
until the kids are now a little older (Karis is almost 10 and Noah is almost
5).
And after this trip, I think our
decision to wait until now was a good one!
It’s amazing how much stuff you have to lug in really difficult carrying
situations.
We were up and down through
lots of subway transfer stops, lugging all that we packed up huge flights of
stairs, shoving to get through doors and onto trains and praying all along the
way that we didn’t loose a kid in the shuffle—or a piece of luggage, for that
matter.
The kids each carried their own
belongings for the week.
For 8 days of
travel, they each had packed one pair of shoes (besides the ones they wore), 8
shirts, 4 pair of shorts, 2 pair of long pants, and 1 long-sleeved shirt (and
socks and undies of course).
If they
wanted to bring anything else (their special blankets, books, a toy, etc.),
they knew they had to carry the weight of it in their own bag.
And they did so!
Noah and Hud occasional (actually, Noah did
most of the time) asked for help with their bags, but Eli in particular is my
little pack horse (following in his dad’s footsteps) and regularly would carry
2 bags up and down the stairs we encountered.
The only loss on the way (which was a biggie)—the case of DVD’s that was
taken out of the entertainment bag to select a movie to watch while on the
train.
Major bummer.
We had about 25 of the kids favorite movies
we had packed for the trip that are now probably being enjoyed by someone else
somewhere….sigh.
We’re hoping it was a
good lesson to learn increased responsibility for our stuff for the kids.
The week was quite rainy, but it didn’t slow us down at
all.
The first day we were told about a
hike up one of the mountains right in town that is the highest peak in
town—where they have the TV tower located.
The man who told us about it did so in passing, also including the
information that our kids were probably too young to make the climb and that it
would be slippery anyway, due to the recent rain.
This was all my crew needed to hear to be
excited about the challenge ahead of them!
So climb the TV tower mountain we did.
We got an amazing view of the town and the endless mountain ranges that
surrounded it, and we had sore legs after our first day—which was a great
feeling!
My mom was blown away by my 4
little ones and how their legs just didn’t give out.
By the time we were within about 100m of the
bottom of the hill, Kevin had Noah on his shoulders, as his shorter legs had
finally hit their max.
The hotel we stayed in was located across a large river from
where the town center was, so each day that we wanted to go into town (which
was pretty much every afternoon for dinner and souvenir shopping), we would
hike down a hill about 20 minutes and then look along the bank of the river for
a boat or a small barge that was willing to take us across to the opposite
bank. This was a highlight for the kids,
and by the end of the week we had gotten to know most of the riverboat drivers
and weren’t getting ripped off as much when we paid them as we disembarked! On the other side of the river was where the
fresh fish (and turtles, water snakes, shellfish, etc.) were being sold. The kids loved going from vendor to vendor to
discover what treasures they were peddling that day. A highlight was when one of the ladies gave
each of the kids their very own crawfish after they proved that they were not
too scared to pick them up and hold them in the air, their pincers flying in
panic. The crawfish accompanied us to
dinner at the restaurant that night, then were freed later to “return to their
families” a little further downstream.
In addition to hiking the TV tower mountain in town, we had
a driver take us to a small village about an hour and a half outside of town
for another longer day of hiking. The
scenery was breathtaking, and we ended in a green valley with ducks and
riverboats passing by that was almost magical.
The kids convinced us that they should hike up their shorts (or take
them off, if you were Noah with the shortest legs!) and wade through the smaller
stream of water so they could get closer to the main flow of water where the
boats were passing by. The kids kept
saying how much they felt like they were in Colorado, where our family loves to
go and explore.
The other two activities we did that were the favorites were
caving and rock climbing.
The caving
adventure started off by a small canoe taking all 7 of us into the mouth of the
cave, then dropping us off (with only 2 flashlights and helmets on everyone!)
to find our way through.
Kevin had previously
been through this cave (he went to the same location a year ago when he
chaperoned a school trip for the high school students), so he was pretty sure
he knew the way to get to the mud pit that was waiting at the other end of the
cave.
We hunted for quite some time,
found lots of stalactites and stalagmites and a large number of bats, and
finally came upon the mud pit.
The boys
stripped down to their underwear and Karis had on a tank top that we’d bought
with the purpose of this one wear and then throwing it away, and the kids had
so much fun floating in this mud pool.
Cleaning off the mud was another story.
I think Hudson wailed the whole time as Kevin doused him with the cold
water of the river once we’d exited the cave; the clothes all had to be thrown
away as the dirt was so fine and so prolific that there was no hope of getting
rid of it all.
And I never dreamed that my kids would be such passionate
rock climbers!
Once they got started, we
couldn’t keep them off the rocks.
We
hired a company to bring us with experienced climbers and all the gear to one
of the popular spots to climb there in Yang Shuo (the smaller city we were in,
which is known to have some of the best rock climbing in the whole world).
The guides who took us there were from all
over the world, all coming to work and climb that area because of the
uniqueness of the geography.
I hadn’t
climbed in about 15 years, but found it really was like riding a bike—with
maybe my legs a little less sturdy than they were when I was 20!
We finally had to make the kids stop when our
time was up, but they’ve all decided (except maybe Noah, who liked going up
more than he liked having to repel to get back down!) they’d like to take up
rock climbing as a hobby.
Our return trip was eventful right at the very end.
I was at least prepared with food for this
journey—even though we didn’t have our DVDs to watch movies
L However, the kicker was when we had arrived
in Beijing and were moving through the subway to get from one train station to
the other one.
In the mix of holiday
travel (it was Tomb Sweeping Day while we were out of town, so many were
traveling back to their home towns to be with family and literally go and visit
and clean the gravesites of their relatives, leaving the countryside spotted
with tombs covered with brightly covered flowers for us to view as we traveled
along the tracks), we got separated on the subway.
Kevin and the boys had gotten on one car, and
as my mom and Karis and I tried stepping on, the doors slammed shut (hard
enough to leave a pretty good-sized bruise on my arm that was caught in the
closing doors!).
Thankfully we were able
to communicate using our phones and just meet up at our next transfer station,
but it really rattled the kids (and the adults!).
In the mess that ensued, we ended up leaving
one of the bags (the one with all my belongings in it) at one of the benches in
the subway station.
We made it all the
way upstairs and purchased tickets for the next train back home to Tianjin when
we realized one bag was missing.
We were
certain that it had been stolen, as we all remembered seeing all the bags and
having them in one location while we were waiting.
We told a police officer, not really thinking
anything could be done.
He was kind
enough to find the surveillance video that came from the camera right by where
our luggage had been stationed.
Would
you believe he discovered that we had walked up with one fewer bag than we
thought we had—proving that our bag had been left somewhere previously!
We were able to backtrack and talk to the
security guards from the subway, and they had my bag—complete with my SLR
camera that is one of my most prized possessions!
Besides getting my favorite shorts and my
camera back, the neatest thing was seeing how it impacted the kids.
When we realized the bag was gone, after I’d
cried a tear or two, we’d all huddled together in the train station and asked
the Father to bring back my bag.
Hudson
and Eli both mentioned that the Father had answered several of their specific
prayers on this trip—one day when they asked for Him to make it stop raining
and then again to bring back the bag.
They both made the comment at separate times that He really does want us
to come to Him and ask for some specifics—and how fun it is to see Him
answer!
What a sweet reminder for all of
us….
And while this just about wraps up our amazing vacation,
this post would not be complete if I failed to mention Kevin’s latest adventure
this past weekend.
He’s been working
with a group of young men who aren’t totally convinced that having our same
religious beliefs are very “manly”.
So
Kevin and a friend have taken up the challenge to prove otherwise!
They’ve come up with a series of “Man
Challenges” over the next several weekends, and they began on Saturday.
The first week involved Kevin buying a live
chicken (this was no small challenge due to the bird flu; however he finally
succeeded after hearing a rooster crow outside the classroom window where he
was teaching, then following the sound to a neighborhood where he found a man
illegally raising chickens in his courtyard; we bought two, but only one made
it to the competition [long story short, the other one figured out how to open
the box up enough to escape when we opened the back end of the car, and she was
faster than either Kevin or I, even after multiple attempts to recapture our
feathered friend!]).
Then the group of
guys went to Trash Mountain where they had a series of events, one of them (and
the highlight, apparently) being chasing and catching the chicken.
They were the spectacle of the park (but didn’t
get arrested, PTL!), and the guys who attended all posted on their social
network that it was one of the most memorable days of their lives!
All this while I’ve got the kids in a more
traditional “teaching” situation—sitting around drinking coffee and tea while
studying parenting techniques (the photo is me using Noah as my model to show
the process we go through when a kid needs a spanking, including the
reconciliation process that happens as we talk through the consequences of our
disobedience).
My ladies also loved the
time, but I’m wondering if I too should try to incorporate chasing live
chickens during our next study…
Our life normally runs at a pretty fast pace. But as we prepare to move and also prepare for a 6-month stay back in the US, the number of things on our to-do lists, the people we're trying to spend time with in "memorable" activities, and the errands we're needing to run might be setting new records for us. So since I've had several people asking what our "normal" routine includes, I'll start off this post with an overview of our family's past week. Keep in mind that this is including the "extras" that are part of our attempt to leave Tianjin well...
Friday--back to school for the whole family (Kevin, Ashley and Noah come home at 1:30); Kevin goes to a meeting with other ex-pats that is lifting up some specific requests while I get ready for Hudson's birthday dinner (his 7th bday!); open presents after the kids get home from the bus stop, then have a bday dinner with only our family and our "surrogate grandparents" who are here, Rob and Barb; party includes Papa John's pizza as the main course, outside game of soccer, and then watching "Frozen" after having cake and icecream (with candles that have multi-colored flames--not really sure what would make them do so, so hoping we didn't take in some unknown carcinogens in the time it took between when they were lit and when they were blown out!)
So that's it! Our lives in a nutshell. Lots of emotions being expressed in pretty much all of us these days. We're all feeling the weight of transition. With the move we're making, and the transience of the international community here, the reality is that there's a really good chance we will not be seeing our best friends here again in this lifetime. We'll be a four-hour flight across the country (or 36 hours by train, if we want to travel the more economical route!). And so many of our friends here either have plans to move within the next 2 years or else are at the international school where you only sign 2-year contracts (or even 1-year long ones), the chances of Tianjin being a whole new place a year or two from now is pretty great. It's a sobering and sad reality that hits like a tidal wave at times....
The number of unknowns regarding our future right now are abundant, too. We'll be back in the States for 6 months, but we're homeless and carless for most of that time! There's a good chance we'll have our needs all provided for through our home group in Dallas, but there's still a lot of pieces that need to come together between now and our return on June 25. Our move out west might be the more unnerving of our questions. We still don't have confirmation that the company Kevin is planning on working for (a sports company that is just getting started) will be ready to provide a visa for our family by the time we need one (when we plan to move there the first week of January 2015). The housing market right now out there is geared toward buying rather than renting; so our friends who just moved there last month literally couldn't find an apartment to rent, and therefore ending up buying one at the spur of the moment! We don't know which group we'll be working with out there (Kevin goes in 2 weeks to take a week-long trip to meet with the different leaders to see if we can determine who would be the best fit, and then our family all goes there from June 11-18 to spend time with as many of the ex-pat families as possible to look for the same thing). Oh, and there was a terrorist attack this past week in the train station of the city we're going to. So it's safe to consider not only the region, but also the city we're going to as slightly unstable. Are we feeling the tension????? Um, yes. I must confess that we are--at least in our bodies physically if not at the conscious level! So we're getting to take our level of dependence and our time on our knees also to a whole new level, as well as trying to stay focused on living one day at a time, taking advantage of every opportunity and every "final fling" with so many who we hold so dear. We'd appreciate your "thoughts" on our behalf in this same regard!
On a lighter note, I've started to think ahead to our time in the US and how blatant of misfits our family is likely to be. Karis and I climbed into a taxi the week before last and she couldn't close the door! She literally didn't know how to hold onto the door properly from the inside and pull the door closed without holding onto the handle. I realized that our mini-van only has a sliding door; so she's used to using that type. But every other car she's in has been a taxi, and our normal routine is to have the kids get in first and slide across the back seat to the door that does not open, then Kevin or I climb in last and pull the door shut (this way the kids aren't left out in the street without us being there next to them). The crazy epiphany made me realize that there are quite a few things our kids just don't know or aren't accustomed to, due to living here in China. And the boys haven't been back in 2 years, so they're really out of touch with typical American culture! So here are a few things that we've probably picked up along the way from living in an Asian society for the past 5 years (this is a warning--and apology!--to those of you who we'll be seeing over the next 6 months in the US!):
