A trip to the country side

On Saturday afternoon we all packed into the family roadster and headed to the mountains. Me, Alison, the Wu family, and the boyfriend, LBX, brought our ‘hiking shoes’ [or cheap Chinese sneakers, or white slip ons as for the Wu mama]. We drive three hours to a small village near Badaling [a tourist site of the Great Wall]. The village has maybe five families in it, like 30 people max. We stayed with a family who Wu has known since the days of Nancy Burgoyne [legendary Texan that Wu drove for before the Nelson clan], and has since gone back to this family to stay. The countryside has an exception to the one child policy: if your first child is a girl, you are permitted another chance to have a boy. This family had an older girl, 15 years old, and a younger boy, 9. We brought them our used clothing- from the Wu’s that might mean t-shirts with holes in it, from me that means clothes from my overly fashionable roommate and my Italian friend Anna. So this little cutest farmer family now are some of the best dressed bumpkins out there.

Everything we ate, they grew on their farm. I’ve never had better [or obviously fresher cucumbers]. The food was very yum. And the father was very excited that I was drinking with him [he was drinking rice wine, I was drinking beer]. We went to bed to awake to both families using their quietest ‘inside voices’ [“WU XIA!!!! COME HERE!!!!”] Lovely. And this was at 5 am. We finally got up at 6 to hear, why did you get up so late! You’re lazy! You already missed the fog! It was so beautiful! We’ve been up since 4! Love it. We got on the trail and hiked up to the Great Wall, just a short two hour hike from the village. We went to a part of the Wall that was not restored, no tourists, just us and some photographers. It was BEAUTIFUL and so awesome to be somewhere where most people don’t get the opportunity to go.

In other Really exciting news, I finally have coffee in my home. No more McDonalds! I got the coffee that I won on my mountain bike race ground, bought a little drip plastic cup thing [the one you put over your coffee cup and pour hot water through it] and filters, and now I am so so happy. Cereal and coffee, what little joys in life.

Summer is really marrying the Swiss. She knows Very Little about the country of Switzerland. She knows the population of Switzerland is the same as her hometown in Shandong province. She knows that the size of Switzerland is the size of Shandong province. She knows there are lots of mountains. That’s all she knows. I wish her the best of luck acculturating herself to her new life. She leaves in September [yes that means I need a new roommate, but not sure who].

I have a big bike race this weekend- Shimano is sponsoring a mountain bike race that might somehow be in the city. Not sure how that is going to work. Looking at photos of the female contenders from past years, I will be overjoyed to have some actual competition. That is this Saturday.

I just sent out two invites to view two albums on snapfish. If you didn’t receive an invite, email me at maokelan18 at gmail dot com and I will send you the link.

You too can speak Chinese. A friend of mine just enlightened me to her latest Chinese/ English realization: you all know the word “gigolo” as in the 1980 movie, “American Gigolo” with Richard Gere. In Chinese, if you say the word ‘gigolo’ it means ‘this building’. In pinyin [the way we Romanicize the way characters sound] it is zhe ge lou. Ha!