I woke up at 3 in the morning. It’s not like I didn’t expect that for my first night of jetlag. I settled down in Yeye’s home office and got some work done. Ada was great and other than a couple of short wakeups, she slept through the night.
We hung around the house in the morning as everybody slowly wakes up. The family is having a hard time communicating with Ada. Yeye is pretty cool. He keeps trying, with pretty good success rates, to make Ada laugh. However, when Ada starts crying, he immediately tries to remedy the situation by making loud noises, pointing at things in attempt to distract her, and offering food for her, when all she really needs is some quiet and comfort, and all that commotion is not helping. Laolao, on the other hand, has no clue what to do with Ada. She’s having all kinds of mobility issues, so she spends most of her time lying down on the couch, either sleeping or moaning as she watches loud videos on her phone. She’d wave to Ada every now and again and release a faint “hallo!” to her. Ada doesn’t like it at all. She’s also not having it with Erjiujiu, who just looks at her. When we took the selfies yesterday, he gestured at me, since he doesn’t speak any English, to pull Ada from her stroller and hold her up for the picture. “She’s sleeping!” I scolded at him, since he also doesn’t understand any English, or any tone that doesn’t include anger. It’s a miracle to me that these people managed to raise kids of their own, but this definitely explains some traits that I’ve noticed in this family.
At some point we got a call from the clothes store – they got clothes for us. I’m constantly amazed by the level of service here in China, mostly since the premise of any interaction doesn’t seem promising: sure we don’t have the stuff here, but we’ll write down your number on a tiny piece of paper, and we’ll call you tomorrow after we get it from storage in another city. I never believe it, but they always follow through. Anyway, we followed Yeye to the store. The guys brought tons of clothes for Ada, we found 6 pieces that we liked, and Yeye insisted on buying us all of them – they are about $6 each.
When we got back home, Yeye said he still needs to get stuff for lunch, and he’s going to use his new electric vehicle for that. Julia thought it was a good Idea for me to join him, and she was right. We’re talking about this bad boy:
And 92 years old Yeye rides it like it was his bitch. We drove on the road, on sidewalks, and through markets, and 10 minutes and 5 near-death experiences we arrived at a restaurant. Yeye identified himself to one of the servers and we were told to sit down and wait for the dishes that Yeye ordered earlier on the phone.
Six millennials were sitting around a table and eating something that looked really good, I tried to take a picture without getting noticed and failed miserably. They looked at each other silently with an expression I’ve seen only millennials wear. It said “Why is this guy taking a picture of us?”, ”who is that old guy?”, “ooh, a foreigner” and “this is so awkward. I’m so awkward.” at the same time. Now it was just me and Yeye sitting at a table. I had to make conversation. “What are they eating?” I asked, but to my disappointment, Yeye jumped from his seat, walked over to kids who seemed to have just gotten over the super awkward encounter with me, and demanded to know what they’re eating. He came back and announced “Fish!”. The kids didn’t know what to do with all that awkwardness. We finally got the stuff we ordered and drove back home.
After lunch we wanted to go to the science museum, and Yeye insisted on joining. Ever since I started working at the Exploratorium, visiting science museums is my favorite thing to do in a new city, and last time we were here the museum was closed for renovations. I was super excited to go: the place is huge, and most of the exhibits are pretty new. As we went in, Yeye tried to explain to me what the map, that was in English, said. I took the opportunity to bark at him a little bit to make sure that he takes his controlling attitude down a notch as we travel through the museum, and that worked pretty well.
The museum itself was o.k., but not more than that. It’s beautifully designed, and it’s absolutely enormous, but a lot of exhibits are not working, or not working well, or suffer from poor design. Often, there would be a sign telling you to push a button, but no button actually exists. It pretty much feels like somebody decided to bring together every single exhibit from every science museum in the world, and to use any technology ever used in an exhibit, and put them all together in one museum. We did get to see a robot shooting hoops perfectly, some cool robotic fish, and a DNA Dance Dance Revolution game.
At some point Yeye and Julia were tired, so they sat down, while I explored some more, and when I came back Yeye was sleeping. It has been a long day for him, and the museum was about to close anyway, so we went home, had dinner, and everybody fell asleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment