Time

I have no sense of time living in China. I have a vague awareness of days of the week because weekends are set up differently than weekdays and Monday is supposed to be my free day. But dates have completely blown passed me. Phil and I got our tickets to the Olympics today. We were so excited that it’s all going to work out. I looked the date on them and realized they are two days before we return to the U.S.A. Then I had to find out what day today was. So we just realized that we only have about 2 ½ weeks left here at our private Shangri-La. How quickly the time has gone by! It’s going to be so strange to go back to a ‘regular’ life of work, deadlines, scheduling, no mid-day naps, and no cook in the house! (Although Phil may beg to differ on that point.)

I am looking forward to things like air-conditioning, cold water, cold hard cider, salads, eating fruit with the skin on it, fewer mosquitoes, having the shower separated from the toilet, and a dryer for our clothes. But I will miss the popsicle flavors, the crazy variety of fruits and vegetables, the slower pace of life, the naps, the sound of the cicadas, the birds of happiness, the amazingly detailed paintings and artwork at temples, and seeing how babies are so doted upon with total love an adoration by everyone in the family.

We had quite an adventurous night last night. A yoga teacher ran and got Phil and me from our room because a snake had appeared in the reading room. Everyone was freaked out and didn’t know what to do. Phil’s response was hilarious. He said to me, “And what am I going to do about a snake? Get you?” I am the animal control person in the household typically. It made me realize how hard it must be to be a parent when your child runs in with some emergency that you have no idea what to do about. Whew! Anyway, we went in armed with brooms, a really (I mean REALLY) long soup ladle, and a large cooking pot (I couldn’t find a sturdy enough bag or pillow case) ready to do battle. We couldn’t find any trace of a snake. So we ended up pulling apart 2 couches and looking in and under every object in the room to help calm everyone. I was quite glad that we weren’t successful in finding the critter since they described it as a more yellow than black snake about 4 feet long with the circumference of a garden hose. Of course, we put on a good show though. At breakfast this morning, Phil reveled in freaking out everyone with stories about how my dad used to catch snakes and cook them up for breakfast. He got some great reactions. Even better, I understood the story he told in Chinese! Hurray!