#220 Crazy Bones

Last year it was the piao piao craze that swept the expat child community in Suzhou. This year it is crazy bones seen above being played by Joseph and his friend Owen. Marco, the dutiful younger brother is looking on as Joseph gambles with his favorite toys and tries to nick a few bones from his buddy.

Kathleen and the kids are headed back to Peoria in a week. They will stay for the month of July. I will remain in China to continue the quest for the perfectly-built Chinese Cat Motor Grader. After their home leave, Kathleen and the kids will return to China and we will all travel to Italy for a few weeks to see the sights and visit my extended family in southern Italy. Kathleen's parents and my father are going to join us in Italy for parts of the trip as well. I am very much looking forward to the Italy trip.

#219 Xiamen Trip

I just returned from a trip to Zhangzhou, a small Chinese town of 3.5 million people in a province about 500 miles south of here. This was a business trip to visit a potential supplier of a motor grader component.

Three colleagues and I flew to Xiamen in Fujian Province. Xiamen is a port city and also a seaside tourist destination with mild weather year-round and I think some beaches. Our arrival in Xiamen was delayed by three hours because of extremely heavy rains. I don't know if these rains made the international news, but apparently flooding near Xiamen caused one death and many injuries yesterday.

Our supplier is in Zhangzhou, about an hour drive from the Xiamen airport. We spent one day and one night in Zhangzhou and it was a long night on the hardest bed on which I have ever slept. The picture of me standing on the bed is an attempt to show the rigidity of the bed surface. Kids jumping on this bed would get more bounce and have more fun jumping on the floor.

I woke up early on Wednesday with bruises on my body and went out for a run around town. In a nearby park I stopped and joined a hundred locals in their morning group exercise routine.

We spent the day at our supplier and had a good discussion of their capabilities and their proposal to manufacture one of our worktool components. You can see them demonstrating their flame cutting machine followed by a photo of the meeting attendees lined up for the traditional China supplier photograph. It was interesting that all of the supplier employees wore shop uniforms including the general manager who is standing to my left.

#218 1st Communion

Again, I am little behind on the blogging, but two weeks ago, Joseph celebrated his first communion at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows church in Suzhou. We were very proud of him and also Kathleen who taught the class with assistance from her friend Paige.

Kathleen and Paige have been holding a weekly preparation class for the kids to take them through the lessons of the sacraments of reconcilliation and communions and preparing them for this big day in the life of a Catholic child.

Two weeks prior to the big day, Kathleen got the surprising news that Bishop Joseph, our regular priest for the English language mass, was going to be out of town on the day of first communion and would be sending a non-English-speaking priest as a stand-in. Bishop Joseph suggested that Kathleen prepare a homily to give on that day. While this added some stress to the event, Kathleen wrote a wonderful homily and delivered it with poise to an appreciative audience on Sunday.

Above you can see the handsome Cazzato boys in their custom made suits and dragon ties, Kathleen giving the homily, Kathleen and Paige with the group of fresh communists, and the Cazzato family all decked out for the occassion.

#217 Sat in Shanghai

We recently had our final Saturday guys outing with Bill. He is moving back to U.S. in a few weeks to resume his duties with the Wheel Loader product group in Aurora.

Bill planned this outing which included three stops - the Shanghai Harley Davidson shop, the new Shanghai Dunkin Donuts, and lunch at our favorite Brazilian BBQ named Latina. As you can gather, Bill doesn't put a high priority on taking in the local Chinese cultural scene ! He is quite excited about moving out and settling back in at home.

I am certainly going to miss his presence in the office, in the neighborhood, and his constant text messages to my cell phone.

#216 Portland Poker

Our China Neighborhood poker group is going strong. We continue to play on two Fridays per month and recently we have had more than 10 players each time.

One of our newcomers, Bernie, is the manager of a restaurant in Suzhou called the Portland Cafe - a good restaurant by the way if you have a chance to go there. Bernie has been lobbying us to hold the poker at his restaurant instead of the Jin Shui Wan clubhouse, so we did that on Friday night. It was a roaring success with a turnout of about 15 guys.

You can see some of our poker partners above. There are Larry from Boston and Michael from New Orleans, Scott from Canada and Dan from Arizona, Darren from Austrailia and Larry again, Tony with waitress/pool girl Linda, and finally Paul (Wales), Stan (Arizona), Rich (Pittsburgh), David (France), Bernie (Vancouver), and Jim (Peoria).

If anyone in Suzhou is looking for a regular poker game, we play on the first and third Friday of every month. New players are always welcome (especially beginners, but not women). If you are interested, please send a message to me through this blog and I'll get you on the email list.

#215 Trip to Peoria

I have been deliquent on blog writing for a couple of weeks now. The week before last I had a business trip to Illinois and had a good visit with friends in Peoria and colleagues in Decatur.

On a Monday afternoon I arrived at O'Hare and had a great time driving the 150 miles to Peoria. It was a beautiful day with blue skies and puffy white clouds. With English language music on the radio I was enjoying three simple things that I never get to see or do in China - cumulus clouds, listen to the radio, and drive myself.

My schedule included four days of work and meetings in Decatur and a day and a half in Peoria for some personal business. The days in Peoria were spent primarily on shopping to resupply items we cannot find in China - clothes, toiletries, medicines, Golden Grahams, playing cards, and kids' shoes. It is remarkable that I buy all of these "Made in China" items for premium U.S. prices and pay extra baggage fees to carry them back to China. You can see above a shot of the Peoria Target store for which Kathleen yearns.

Friday night I met up with my Peoria neighborhood poker group and had a great time catching up with friends and losing some money (U.S. cash for a change). Saturday night I had dinner with Greg, Margaret, and kids at the West Bluff coffee house called One World - a highly recommended local Peoria joint.

#214 Biking & Hiking

Yangshou has some incredible opportunities for hiking and biking. On Friday we took a very long bike ride and a climb to the top of a hill called Moon Peak. The hills and mountains just pop vertically out of an otherwise flat landscape. The rice fields in between are a bright green and the clouds seemed to stick to the hill tops.

We rented five bikes for the Cazzato family including a tandem for Maria and I. The cost was pretty cheap - 10 to 50 RMB ($1-$4) each for the entire day. Kathleen and Juliana got the 50 RMB premium mountain bikes and were glad to have them when we ran into a few muddy spots. Poor Marco got a folding bike with eight inch diameter wheel. It looked more like a scooter than a bicycle.

Nonetheless, all of the kids did very well for quite a long bike ride with lots of stops to wait for each other and take pictures. Katheen remarked repeatedly that travel with these four kids gets significantly easier every year and she is right.

I have posted a collection of photos from our full Yangshou weekend at snapfish.com. Please have a look - they took me several hours to upload through my slow Chinese internet connection !

#213 Yangshou Locals

We saw many interesting locals during our long weekend in Yangshou. I captured a few of the more colorful folks here.

The guys on the bamboo raft seem to be delivering flowers to a cave along the riverbank. The next woman is picking vegetables and loading them up on a bian dan for transport. Agriculture and tourism are the main industries in Yangshou.

We watched the next dude with two cells phones scream into both phones simultaneously while smoking a cigarette. He was part of the chaos that surrounded the bamboo boat launching site.

The kind-looking lady with the water buffalo demanded after I took her picture that I pay 5 RMB. I gave her 2 RMB and she gestured disapprovingly. Soon after, we encountered the next happy scene of four children in two bian dans. Though the smiled for the picture, these ladies also scowled and demanded cash. I gave each kid 1 RMB then ran out of small bills. The mothers (grandmothers ?) acted looked at me like I stole the kid's tickle-me-Elmo doll.

The child in the final picture is the two year old local tour guide. The son is relieving himself on the deck of the Shangri La tourist trap center in Yangshou as our driver holds him in place. We were within 40 steps of a rest room but this is the norm with small children in China. Kathleen reminds me that this is why we should take our shoes off when we enter the house.

#212 Yangshou City

The town of Yangshou is a pretty hopping place of 50,000 or so people. It is nestled among the limestone peaks alongside the Li River and offers lots of unique restaurants, shopping, and nightlife to enjoy after a day or rock climbing, whitewater rafting, or something even more taxing such as supervising four children under the age of ten.

The accomodations in Yangshou are primarily small, local guest houses and hostels rather than large, 5 star hotels. We stayed in a small hotel called the Imperial Palace. It had a great location overlooking the river but was pretty non-descript and non too clean. The mattresses were remarkably hard, even for China. I had to rotate frequently during the night to avoid bruising and numbness.

The town was bustling with activity. The streets were packed with people and street vendors, especially this weekend with the Chinese holiday of Duanwu. All in all, it had all of the high prices and poor service to match any tourist trap in the U.S. but made up for it with the incredible mountain setting and charming ancient streets.

#211 Li River Rafting

This week was China's annual Dragon Boat Festival which Caterpillar marked by giving us Thursday and Friday off from work. Kathleen set us up with a trip to Yangshou and the Li River in southern China. Although we have now been in China for almost two years and have been to several Asian countries on R&Rs, we haven't done much travelling yet within China. For this trip, we flew two hours south to Guilin, the capital of Guangxi province, to the west of Hong Kong.

If you have ever seen a National Geographic article about the wonders of China's countryside, you have certainly seen pictures of this region. It is a spectacular setting of steep mountains popping out of flowing rivers and pastoral rice fields. We started our vacation with a small six person boat cruise down the Li River which connects Guilin and Yangshou. The next day we had another river experience on smaller three person "bamboo boats" on a tributary called the Yu Long River.

Everywhere we looked, the scenery was amazing. The boat rides themselves were also quite a lot of fun with waterfalls and a few rapids that got our feet wet.