29 August 2011

Marcel meets Emilia


Emilia is the cute and happy little girl, in more or less Marcel's age. They have met for the first time one week ago and it was an interesting event. Already at this age they both were playing 'hard to get' if the other one showed interest :) Fortunately they gave each other few minutes of attention... Let't see how it will look like on their second date :)


21 August 2011

Vincent loves his school

After three years in Swedish kindergarden, Vincent became more open to new things. He is a little-big curious guy who loves knowing everything about everything. He keeps asking questions and as it wasn't enough with asking questions he is following them with next question: "How do you know that?". He makes me reading a little bit more, just to keep up with his interests :)

But now Vincent has faced new challenge, an international school with English and Mandarin as main languages. Vincent was extremely excited about the school. After two months without his Swedish school and friends he needed a change.
We went to school
on Wednesday and we got a general presentation for new families we also had a chance to see his classroom and meet his teacher. During the presentation, a short movie about the school and brief presentation of key persons there he was clapping his hands with everybody and had this wonderful smile on his face. He definitely enjoyed it! But the best part was still ahead of us.
When we came to his classroom, there were no other kids, just the teacher. Perfect situation, my analyzing kid had a chance to meet his teacher properly and discover all the toys in the room in a very relaxed atmosphere. The teacher turned out to be a male! He seems to be a cool person, but at the same time quite strict on the rules he has. Very good combination :)
Vincent got interested in some things in the room and started playing. After a while when he already felt comfortable with surroundings, the other kids came. Kids are funny in this age :) They do not approach each other, just go around observing others behavior or simply ignoring each other... :) After en hour he still didn't want to leave and I had to use persuasion techniques to get him out of there. The promise of next day worked pretty well.
His first days went very very good. In the morning, before we left the house he said "I am so happy, I'm gonna cry"... This feeling must have been very strong, because he said that in Polish to me and a minute later in Portuguese to Rodrigo :)
In school he listened to the teacher, played a lot and read books. When I came to pick him up, he made a comment that he didn't meet any kids yet... I guess all kids are still a little bit confused and try to find themselves in the new situation... The second day he said: "Mommy, can you pick me up a little bit later?" :) That was such a relief... he likes his school a lot! After second day I asked him "Can you understand when your teacher talks to you?" and he answered "Yes, and I also understood the movie we watched today". Great!

Vincent has a weekly schedule, including visit to library (twice a week), Mandarin classes (every day), art, science and physical exercise. He is wearing the school uniform. He has 10 classmates from US, Germany, Holland, China, Sweden and Norway. Quite a mix.

This weekend he was thinking a lot about Monday and what he will do in school. I just hope that tomorrow after school he will be as happy as he was last week!

20 August 2011

The Great Wall is great

Last day of our Beijing holiday, me, Vincent and my mom, we were planning on going to the Great Wall. Of course, to be in China and in Beijing, the Great Wall is a must to see place.

To make it easy we bought an one day bus tour. Unfortunately weather forecast wasn't the best, but we hope bestanyhow. In the morning we went to the bus and the first rain drops starting falling down. After 15 min it was raining cats and dogs...
We stopped at another hotel to pick up more tourists. We were 11 persons, us three, one Mexican girl and seven Chinese fellow travelers.
We made a first stop at Ming Tombs. Very quick visit and nothing extremely spectacular, but interesting. After that we had lunch and during this lunch we saw how great Chinese people we had a chance to meet. They spoke very little English but somehow we manage to have a nice conversation. They were group of doctors. They come from a city close to Shanghai and they do not like Beijing cosine, therefore they brought some of their own food - a bag of dried small fish and a soup, or rathe a little plastic bag with some powder which the put into the big bowl of hot water. We were offered both fish and soup, which we kindly accepted with a smile on our faces :)
They were making sure we ate and drunk enough :)

When we got to the wall it was still raining, but much less. The first thing we did was to buy rain jackets which turn out to be made of a foil like very bad garbage bags. But we didn't have a choice and we took what was there :) They were in very bright colours, light blue, yellow and purple :)

We started climbing. You can definitely say that millions people has done the same. Some steps were 'sampled' by human feet. Some steps were very low and some very high, which made the
whole thing less easy. But nobody promised it will be easy :)
Here our Chinese friends showed again extraordinary politeness. One of them was carrying an umbrella over Mexican girls head and the other was waiting for us to make sure that everybody will make it to the top. One man took Vincent's hand and helped him to take the steps. Vincent though it was a lot of fun and got very high tempo and our Chinese friend held up to it. We got a bad conscious for that, but he seemed to enjoy it :)


After one hour we reached the top! The view was marvelous. High mountains and many kilometers of the wall throughout them. It was definitely worth the effort.

And right then, when we started going down we understood that going up was a piece of cake compared to going down. But Vincent again took the lead and almost run 'downstairs' :) We came 15 min behind :)

After we came down we had a great cup of coffee and Vincent had ice cream with his little Chinese friend :)

I want definitely to go back there, to see different part of the wall. And since Rodrigo didn't go with us this time, probability of going back there with him is pretty high :)

08 August 2011

Beijing ZOO - buuu

Day 1 in Beijing.
We decided to start with something extra important for Vincent to set up his spirit high up for next few days. Since we started talking about moving to Shanghai, he was very excited about Panda Bear and it became quite a motivation for him to come here. He wanted to see Panda Bear. We wanted to do it too, so we took of for Beijing ZOO.
In general, idea of zoo isn't really the best by it self, but you get your hopes high when you finally decided to go there.You want to get amazed by the nature, take few interesting photos and in a way relax...
But in Beijing ZOO you get three times NO...
1. You do not get amazed by nature, because the animals do not live a fancy life there...
There was not a single animal that had a normal living conditions.












You could watch pandas from behind the glass window. One of them was sitting at the gate as it wanted to escape. The other one looked like she was a very old or very sick... The biggest pleasure from Panda area was to look at the souvenirs...

Wolves were the saddest view... Four of them were 'exposed' in sort of glass cage in size of 5x5m with ONLY sand. Not a single leaf or bush. They were digging holes in the ground trying to hide. Their fur was dirty and matt. Some of them were injured. When I saw them I immediately thought about Nordens Ark in Sweden and the wolves living there on the big forrest areal representing truly wonderful species.

A tiger was sleeping in the shadow as it was around noon and very hot and steamy. People were throwing water plastic bottles to force him to move...
Bats were constantly photographed with a flash as people tried to see them. They also tried spitting on the glass counting on their reaction...

2. I didn't take many photos, because it turned out to be the least inspirational place I have been to.
Well, it was very dirty, a lot of garbage on the ground and almost not a single one garbage bin... There are some works being done (I hope improving anything) so we could hear a lot of noises coming from saws and drills...
And as if it wasn't enough there is a huge highway going just above...







3. Relax - forget about it!
So many people... Everywhere... Shouting (their way of being)...



If you plan on coming to Beijing, I recommend you to focus on historical places and skip the zoo...








07 August 2011

Beijing is big

After unpacking and arranging our house, it was time to do something nice. Why not to go to Beijing for couple of days?

Weather forecast didn't look very promising, but since it hardly ever turns out to be true, we hoped for the best.

We took the bullet train, the (very) fast train between Shanghai and Beijing. It took me some time to get used to average speed of 306 km/h that was displayed in the wagon. But after two hours I stopped thinking about it:)
It is a very convenient way of traveling since it takes only 5,5h and it is 1318km distance. And it is definitely part of Chinese charm and a way of meeting Chinese people.

Our wagon was almost empty, so it felt very comfortable, also with our 4 months old baby. I got very surprised when on the way to the restaurant I passed few wagons fully packed. They were very crowded (obviously), laud and smelled with all kinds of food. In the aisle of every wagon you can find a tap with cold and hot drinking water. The hot water is used by passengers very often to make an instant soup. One soup - ok, but 100 of them give a really heavy mixture in the air. I said to Rodrigo that I am very happy with our places. Of course on the way back from Beijing our wagon looked exactly as I described it above - crowded, laud and filled with smell of all kinds of all kinds of food...

Beijing is huge. It is enormous. Its main avenue is 40 km long and 50 m wide. 8 lanes each way...
One day, me and my mom decided to walk back to the hotel with Marcel in the carriage. He was sleeping and we like walking... On the map it didn't look too far away. And since we like walking...
After three hours walking we haven't even made 1/3 of the distance... We tried to catch a cab, but for some reason any of the empty ones (they were only 5 by the way) didn't want to stop...
We took a bus and two subway lines and after one more hour we got back to the hotel. A very happy moment for our feet :)

Typhoon Muifa spared us...

It didn't feel good when media started warning for the worst since many years typhoon approaching East coast of China. At first it was classified as 'super typhoon' (strongest in 4 steps scale), but then it was still almost 1000 km away from the coast. Later it was 'just' a strong one. They were saying that the waves will reach 12 m and winds will be 160-170 km/h...

The feeling got even worse when they said that about 300.000 people has been evacuated from the most 'risky' places along the cost.

Then we found a letter from management of the compound that we should prepare for the typhoon, close all the windows properly, hide any loose items and stay at home during the whole weekend.

The whole Saturday we were checking the weather forecast and latest news on the Muifa. It felt really good when it turned out that typhoon had changed its path and went more into the sea.
It all ended up in just slightly stronger winds (60-70 km/h), few broken tree branches and some rain.

Thank God, this time, the fact that nature is unpredictable played in our favor...