There is always a new experience to be had here in China. Everything is done differently here. We are terrible at speaking Chinese, but we are trying. There is alot of nodding and smiling that goes on. Everyone here has special house shoes. We thought we'd do this too-you know, the when in Rome thing. It was going great until Mike forgot he was wearing his house-slippers and wore them to work! I am spoiled and have a housekeeper. She doesn't speak a bit of English. She always tries to talk to me in Chinese. She thinks that if she keeps saying the same thing over and over again, she I will understand her! But she is really nice and works very hard. We don't drive here. We have a really nice driver named Jiang. He really takes care of us and is working hard to learn a few English words. I guess we meet somewhere in-between as we are learning Chinese words as well. He is funny because sometimes he will go into a new place with me and try to be my translator. You can imagine how well this works as he doesn't speak my language. He did come in and help us bargain for the material for a suit for Mike the other day. I think he did a great job.
Our neighbors (multiple) have chickens and roosters. They run around the neighborhood and sometimes dogs chase them up trees. There are workers in our compound who walk around cleaning (or I should say wiping as I have never seen anything rinsed out or any dissinfectant) everything. They mop the street, they wipe down the playground multiple times a day. They wipe down front portches, electrical boxes, and in the rain, they scrub the road with brushes. I put garbage out on the front of my sidewalk and it dissapears!
Everywhere we go, people stare at us. People bring their babies up to meet Eli like it is some great honor for their child. Most of the time, the baby doesn't even look at him:-) People take pictures and point. The kids are good sports about it. I don't know if we will ever get used to it. When we were at the zoo, we were feeding the turkeys and goats, and looked over to see many people lined up along the fence looking in. We realized that they weren't looking at the animals-they were looking at us! So I guess we were the main attraction at the zoo that day.
