Home Leave (part 1: Visiting with the Dog Cousins @ Retro House)

Home Leave (part 1: Canada Pics - Mom's B-day Picnic)

Home Leave (part 1: Canada Pics - Canada Day)

O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command. With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

Ô Canada! Terre de nos aïeux, Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux! Car ton bras sait porter l'épée, Il sait porter la croix! Ton histoire est une épopée Des plus brillants exploits. Et ta valeur, de foi trempée, Protégera nos foyers et nos droits. Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.

A Baker's Dozen

Mr Johnson & I celebrated our 13^th wedding anniversary on July 5, the first Monday after I arrived in Alberta. It was the first one we’ve spent apart. 5770 miles apart (an approximate based on a google search.)

He sent me these pretty flowers. Most were still blooming when we left Thursday. The lilies have expired, but the Bells of Ireland are still going strong.

Thanks, Mr Johnson. Happy Anniversary. I love you. Please hurry up and get to Chicago!

@ 15,000 feet

“I wish I hadn’t seen that,” I told Mr. Johnson last spring as we were connecting through Shanghai.

We had an evening connection home to QD. We had duly waited for our connection, boarded the bus that would shuttle us to the aircraft, and climbed the rolling stairway in the darkness. The little girls were each holding one of my hands as we climbed the steps, somewhere around their usual bedtime. And it happened.

The pilot, a fifty-something Chinese man, was rapping on the glass… beaming and waving wildly at our three blondes.

“Great,” I thought, “this clown is going to pilot us home.”

But today, just before we boarded our tin can to Chicago (we’re flying on a CRJ700 regional jet, seating capacity 66) I saw our pilot. I think he was twelve. And the co-pilot, he’s probably MGJ’s age.

And suddenly that 50+ clown in Shanghai seemed more credible. He was probably retired military. Trained by the air division of the People’s Liberation Army. And, that’s the kind of resume I like to think of, when cruising at 15,000 feet.

Because I checked in today with children, we got the glamorous seats-in-the-very-back-by-the-toilet.

The flight attendants, who might be college students, are seated directly behind us.

I just overheard, “Are you friends with so and so,” and I immediately knew she meant facebook friends, not look-them-in-the-eye-go-out-for-coffee-or-shoe-shopping-friends.

I turned around discreetly and discovered the female attendant was wearing her ipod ear buds and doing the connect the dot children’s puzzle from the in-flight magazine.

Bei Bei bemoaned, “We flew all the way from Qingdao to see our grandparents, but this flight to America” is so long.

“Don’t worry,” I consoled her. “There’s a dot-to-dot puzzle in your seat pocket.”

Home Leave (Part 1: Canada - A few of my favorite things....

It's been fun to introduce the girlies to the many wonders of the Prarielands of Alberta, and my favorite things, things I absolutely love about coming to Canada in the summer. There are so many things I love about Canada, things that I don't really appreciate fully until I'm here again and find myself doing, a thoughtful, "Oh, yeah... I forgot about that..."

My Favorite Things:

The midnight sun. (Okay, so not quite midnight, but 2230 is pretty close!)

Even when its hot its not really hot (we've been waking to cool mornings around 10C)

The mournful wail of a train

Sighting wild animals...

the big doe that sauntered down the sidewalk across the street one of the first mornings we were here, stopping to casually nibble the neighbor's daisies ... the giant jackrabbits that peek out in various places

Sighting the non-wild animals...

cattle, horses, llamas and elk raised on the ranches and farms in the area

Seas of ripe rapeseed (we know it as canola... it's a beautiful in its flowering yellow state.)

Green fields of wheat that will, in a few weeks turn into a waving amber sea

Random farm decor (giant statue holding a round hay bale, next to his cowgirl girlfriend holding a square bale)

The World's Largests (The Worlds' Largest shopping mall- and to name just a few of the more obscure ones: The world's largest Bunnock, The worlds' largest Ukranian Egg, or the World's largest Lamp... we, I am proud to say, visited the Lamp and its adjacent museum)

But my favorite thing about Alberta is the sky. It's like being in a giant omni-max theater... everywhere you look is sky. It's so blue. I find myself just staring up at it.

And when it storms... simply majestic, because of its sheer size.

There's been a lot of rain in the time we've been visiting, and there is the lovely smell of rain hitting the dark soil. It's a perfect fresh smell, never appropriately captured by products-from soap to airfreshners-that try to duplicate the aroma.

Rainbows. Bei Bei saw her first real rainbow the other day. It was a complete rainbow, even a double rainbow in a few spots.

My Favorite Memories

When I was a kid we would spend a few weeks in the summer up here. We would don sweatshirts and bug spray and revel in the fresh air and cool summer weather. When we would head back to school in the fall, other kids would come back with stories of beach holidays that were evidenced by sun tans. But we weren't jealous, because, even though we didn't grow much darker (bundled under our hoodies) we had the distinct advantage of having nearly 18 hours of sunlight on the longest summer days.

We lived for part of those long ago weeks in the old home my great grandparents, immigrants from Wales, built shortly after they arrived in Canada. We would bundle under wool blankets at night in . We would place Canadian pennies down to the railroad tracks, and go back the next day to find their smoothed and thin remains. We would wake in the morning to the sounds of our relatives sleeping in the common upstairs rooms (in the very beds my grandfather and his eight siblings once slept in) that housed five double beds. Waking up under the heavy weight of wool blankets, with the cool, almost-wet air was my favorite memory, with my grandmother downstairs in the kitchen (with the sloping floor and the ancient calendar perpetually stuck in 1942) stoking the old kitchen stove. This remains one of my most distinct memories. (When I reminiscing with my auntie, who is one of the share holders of what remains of the tumbling estate, she assures me that the morning air always felt very damp, and that it was decidedly less pleasant to wake in this fashion if your favorite family members were not the ones snoring in the double bed across the linoleum floor from you!)

My Favorite Food

Canada has food I don't think to eat, or cannot find when I'm in other parts of the globe:

Poutine: French fries with gravy and cheese with a smidge of vinegar

Salt & Vinegar Chips (or my runner up, "All Dressed" flavour)

Perogies (Ukrainian dumplings)

Donairs (a Gyro like wrap with beef or chicken and tezziki sauce or sweet sauce)

Naniamo Bars-- a delectable layered "sqaure" or "slice", which originated in Naniamo, BC

Smarties candies... which, in my opinion are better than M & Ms (but then maybe I just think so because I don't see them as often)

Macintosh Toffee

A whole array of Nestle chocolate bars that never made their way south of the boarder: Coffee Crisp, Crunchie, the Aerobar . . .

And of course... the deliciously sweet fruit from BC, that is quite simply unparalleled anywhere (so glad we have a stop over scheduled in Vancouver!)

My Favorite People

Oh, and of course there are wonderful people here. My people. My parents. My sister. My aunties and uncles. My nearly 90 year-old grandmother. I will post more about the special people that are the reason for our soujourn. But for now, I wanted to offer a glimpse of how I see this part of Canada.

The story of me being Canadian

"You're Canadian?" read the one line e-mail my friend from Qingdao shot me last week.

(He had invited our girls to a July 4th party at the English book store he manages in QD, and I had sent back regrets.)

I could sense an inkling of incredulousness, as I sent the message to the trash. I'll explain it to him when we get back, I thought a little wearily... what I have been explaining my whole life:

my dad is Canadian

my mum is American

we grew up (mostly) in the US, but my parents moved back to Canada when I was in college, and, since I was under 21 I qualified for Canadian citizenship.

When I was growing up my Dad had a green card, paid US taxes, and seemed like any other American bloke, except that he couldn't vote. (Which must have, at some points in the 80s and 90s felt like a blessing.)

Today my three sibs and I are are stretched out across four countries. I have a sister in the US, a sister here in Canada, and a brother living in Japan.

It felt cumbersome to explain the details when I was a child. And awkward. We lived largely in the mid-western United States, in agrarian societies with little mobility. (I married a man who had grown up in the same county both of his parents had.)

But sometimes I use it as a crutch. Nobody ever says, "Don't be the ugly Canadian," when traveling abroad, they way they say, "Don't be the ugly American." Because, Canadians are by-and-large easy going, and well-liked internationally. When a strong anti-French sentiment was sweeping China (pre-Olympics, during the torch relay across Europe), taxi drivers would routinely ask if I was French. I would tell them I wasn't, and then for good measure toss in, "I'm Canadian." When a large group of Iraqi men cornered us in a public garden in Shanghai, in the waning months of W's presidency I whispered loudly to Mr Johnson, "Just tell them we're Canadian."

Since moving abroad, however, I realized that the quandary of my citizenship, and my parents' situation was not all that unique. My kids have friends with dual citizenships and multiple passports. I now have lots of friends who have spouses from other countries.

At least my parents both spoke English. I have many friends who don't share a same first language as their spouse. Some rely on English for their common language within their marriage and family, even if English is not a their mother tongue. I think of how often communication between the sexes is often convoluted, and think how it must be even more so when the language is yet another barrier. Yet somehow it works.

I often overhear my kids explaining where they fit in this way:

We are Americans, but we live in China

or sometimes they say:
Wo men shi Meiguo ren, dan shi wo me zhu zai Zhongguo

我们美国，但是我们在中国住

And then I wonder, will they someday feel like all the explaining is cumbersome and awkward? or is it simply now part of the routine?

Home Leave (part 1)

We left a smoggy, humid, pollution-choked Beijing on the last day of June. It was sticky inside and out. Taxi drivers voluntarily rolled up the windows and blasted the A/C. That's how summer-like it already was in the capital.

I didn't really have the longing for China I thought I might feel when we left the Middle Kingdom for the balance of the summer. We've never done this before-- left the week after school got out and booked return tickets for the week school goes back into session. The uniforms will never even get put away. (Which I find a little disturbing.)

QD too was feeling sticky and steamy. The foggy mist had been traded out for the grimy humidity. There was no longer a coolness in the undertone of the breeze. The beaches began to smell like low tide. I was okay with going. But sad to be going as a group of four instead of five. I miss Mr Johnson.

The girlies outdid themselves (again) on the plane. They were easy. They impressed the flight attendants, and made what could have been a nightmare (me, alone with three kids, between three airports) an absolute breeze. Except that we weren't entirely alone. The plane was full to capacity, and four of the other passengers were good friends of ours who are moving home to Vancouver.

We've slowly been adjusting to Mountain Standard Time. It's hard to know if its jet-lag, or just falling into a lazy summer schedule, but we are routinely waking somewhere after 10 each morning. The girls are relaxed and comfortable. They scoot (we schlepped three scooters with us from Asia), they play, they snack, they read (we've made two trips to the local library, and E. has completed 11 books!), they swim, they chill in the hammock and play hard, trying out all the local playgrounds. There is time with Grandma and Grandpa and Great-Grandma Lilly Lew too (who is just a few minutes away... a five minute scooter ride... and there are cookies in the cupboard.) We've had a picnic birthday party for my mom. We've spent time Auntie Beth and "Auntie" Neill (what Bei Bei mistakenly calls my brother-in-law). MGJ even got to spend the weekend in Edmonton, where she shopped, and ate on the trendy/alternative White Ave, and caught the late show of the latest Twilight movie. We've had brunch with my Uncle & Auntie here, and dinner in the city with my Aunties there.

It's midnight and time to hit "publish post". It's time to go retrieve a sleeping Bei Bei from E.'s bed, where she is no doubt stealing the covers and hogging the bed from her sister who generously allowed her to cuddle there. There are lots of things the girls are noticing in North America: The blue skies, the green lawns, single family homes and homes with basements (none of which are part of our residential experience in China.) Bei Bei is scared of the basement (or what my niece, who lives in Florida, where homes are predominately on poured slabs, called "the creepy place under the house"). Of course the finished basement here isn't creepy, its just unfamiliar, and Bei Bei who is intimidated by so little doesn't do the basement solo.