Freedom!

Our blessed a-yi!  For the past month James and I have been enjoying Saturday afternoons out while our a-yi (housekeeper) stays home with sleeping kids.  It has been such a sanity-saver for us to be able to get out together just the two of us and explore the city.  A couple of weeks ago we traversed two uncharted (for us) areas of our new hometown.  The first, Xintiandi, is famous for being the location of the first congress of the Chinese Community Party as well as its traditional shikumen ("stone gate") houses on narrow alleyways.  The beauty and the poetry of it is, this significant historical site for Chinese Communism is now a thriving shopping area (long live Chinese capitalism!).

The next stop was an antiques market.  Take "antiques" with a grain of salt.  Shop and stall owners will swear up and down that this vase or that statue is 700 years old, but if you look closely, you'll find workers in the back room taking spanking new merchandise and aging it with sandpaper and dirt (or so it is told on the grapevine).  But, if you are looking for antiques from a more recent era, there is a cornucopia of relics from the last century: radios, fans, lamps, microphones, typewriters, record players, telephones, iron stoves, propaganda and silver screen movie posters, ancient suitcases, medium-format cameras abound...you name it, it's here, crammed in some shop or laying in a heap on the sidewalk.  

Whatever you do, don't say cheese--large-format cameras and cannons don't combine well.

The scrum of treasures

Zhqt do you notice?

Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo

The Shanghai Zoological Park is a short walk up the street from us.  I, like many of you, have seen the YouTube videos of crazy stuff going down at Chinese zoos, so I've been a little hesitant to go.  However, after being locked up with three boys for three weeks of Christmas break, I was willing to brave the lions.  We went twice in a three day period with two different groups of friends.  On Friday (week ago last), immediately upon entering the gates, the children heeded the invitation of wide open spaces to RUN.

 and RUN

We saw a few creatures, Jonah found a snake skin on the ground of the reptile house (not a display, just trash...ah, China)...

then found another field in which to run and throw dirt clods at one another (with only one occurrence of a rock injury--sneaky rock).

We ate lunch near another field, with more running, then focused on animals and walking through the park for a while.

The following Monday we went with a different set of monkeys...

(Look at those beggars!  Sign clearly visible to not feed the animals, but they know they're going to get something.)

So actually, these were the monkeys:

We learned where to go to avoid danger:

Something tells me it's all happening at the zoo.  I do believe it, I do believe it's true.

Dinner and laundry

Or the public execution of Daffy.

(Yes, those are socks on the palm tree/bush in the foreground.)

Happy New Year from the Cores

The weather outside

Yesterday was gray and frightfully cold.  Snow sprinkled down intermittently like a flurry of polka dots.