Kleenx kind of day...

We don't have colds, but we do have sniffles. Today we bid farewell to friends (again) wondering how many more sad goodbyes we'll endure before we're the ones packing suitcases and sea containers for slow boats from China.

EHJ wept and Bei Bei followed suit. MGJ & I had tear filled eyes. It is as EHJ bemoaned... its just so hard ... And that's just the way it is.

Good bye M-L Family. God speed. Good luck. Bon voyage. Wave to the Great Wall from your posh business class seats. When you land breathe deep the mid-Western air, run barefoot through your green lawn, stay up to watch the fireflies. Cruise the aisles @ Target, enjoy a good Chicago style pizza (and all the culture and class that the Windy City has to offer.) And... never forget that the Johnsons in China will remember you, as we do all our other friends who have come to and left QD. Wear your China Years Badge with pride... its been an amazing journey, I'm glad we shared part of it together! Zai Jian hao Pengyou men! Zai Jian.

Independence Day

Here are the girlies on American Independence Day in China.

With so many things blocked here these days (blogger, facebook, twitter, youtube) it makes me think about how much we are guaranteed under the first amendment in the US.

Perfect Days

Our kids, as note previously, attend a British based international school with 188 student days on the calendar. The Brits believe in all sorts of educational standards that the US has not implemented, and a six to seven week summer holiday is one of them.

It's a brief window of time, to be sure, a flip and a half of the calendar page, and they'll soon be back in uniform, toting backpacks and lunch bags, with rigid bedtimes and schedules.

So... we're trying to make the most of it. Bedtimes are relaxed, mornings are lazy, and in between are trips to the beach and pool, collecting snails in the garden and seaside walks in the evening. These days are perfect. Brief, yet perfect.

Life's a Beach

There is something absolutely freeing about living by the sea. It's great to on a whim decide to pack up and head to the beach. This afternoon we grabbed-up the striped "Bag of Fun" (the beach Bag of Fun, not the pool Bag of Fun) and within five minutes we were seaside.

The tide was in... almost all the way in. The waves were roaring over the tide pools and crashing into the seawall. Bei Bei and I found a dryish patch of sand for our blanket, and the big girls dashed off to jump into the waves. We had juice boxes, Starbucks and today momma came armed with the Nikon.

Bei Bei was delighted meet a classmate from her kindie on our sandy playground. Content to stay within meters of the beach blanket (our line crosser is curiously afraid of getting her feet wet!) she joined her pengyou, Apple (our third Chinese friend to choose this English "name"). With each whop of the upturned bucket came squeals of delight from both the pres-schoolers as Apple's baba assisted them with their sandcastle endeavor.

The big girls had squeals of their own (and their momma had a few later as well, though not ones of delight, when they both ended up TOTALLY DRENCHED.) Mr. Johnson had no sympathy for his tai tai... "it's the beach, you get wet," he said simply.

Life's A Beach... @ least in QD in July.

Pretty Flowers

The morning of our anniversary we woke up before the kids ... a rarity on a weekend to be sure. We'd attended an alfresco dinner party on July 4th that ended late. The girls had played hard and had fun... a pleasant mix of Italian, Danish, Korean and English, had wafted over from the playground to where the adults savored their last sips of wine. The girlies Old Navy flag tees the only indication of the date or that across the globe Americans were just waking to celebrate their country's Independence.

So our American babies slumbered late Sunday morning, and we waited ... having overheard their plans the day before for breakfast in bed. Sure enough around 8:30, three girlies, still in their flag shirts, sweetly entered with a tea tray set with two mugs of Nescafe and two chocolate bars. They had made cards, sang "Happy Anniversary," and bought us roses with petals made from soap. It was sweet. AND worth lingering in bed for!

Mr. Johnson had a surprise of his own, and flowers arrived around 9:30 a.m. (see the pretty blooms above.) That night (after fellowship in the a.m. and the girls' play date @ the pool in the afternoon) we went to dinner @ our favorite little Italian joint and walked in the summer rain.

Happy Anniversary, Mr. Johnson! Thanks for 12 wonderful years. Thanks for playing True Companion (our song... sung @ our wedding) Sunday morning as we breakfasted on Korean chocolate and lukewarm instant coffee. And... thanks for the pretty flowers!

Full Circle

July 5 marked a dozen years since become Tai Tai Johnson.

"What were you doing 12 years ago, at this exact time?" my friend Joan asked me Sunday afternoon as we watched from deck chairs as four of our combined five children frolicked in the pool.

"I think we were probably @ the reception," I mused. She asked more questions about our marriage and where we lived, and as I was recounting it, I thought of how our life has pretty much come full circle. I described how shortly after our wedding we took all of our earthy belongings-- a 1950s bedroom set from the newspaper, a couch (loveseat really) that his grandma recovered in a khacki check, and a pressed board entertainment center we had splurged on at Sears and moved into our married student housing apartment in Urbana.

Joan's a U of I girl too, so she knows the area, and laughed as I described the mailboxes @ the entry of our cinderblock mansion. I wish we had taken a photo of the names on those boxes. Chinese names, and African ones, more Chinese and then, smack in the middle, JOHNSON emblazoned on #201. Full circle. Our mailbox today looks the same!

In the Trenches

Perched on top of the lookout

with the grands

Peeking out from the lookout

The gunners

Climbing up the the lookout

Golden Germans

On Father's Day we made a pilgrimage to another manly place. (Do you like the Top Gun soundtrack? I thought it helped meld the masculine/military theme of these two most recent posts.) Three years in, and we had never visited Qingdao Shan (Hill/Mountain) Fort the site of a military command post/fort created by the Germans at the turn of last century. And it wasn't an easy task to find it. Unlike so many other tourists traps in our city that are over publicized, and over priced (like the Navy Museum, in my mind) the Qingdao Hill Fort remains reclusive, and even our driver, who seems to know most parts of our huge city needed to ask for directions!

The fort rests within the hill... a carved out bunker of more than 50 halls and rooms. Like everything else the done by the Germans, the trenches they carved into the seaside hills over 100 years ago, when Qingdao was Tsingtao (or the more German "Tsingtau") are meticulous. Long corridors at the end of which are lavatories (long corridors to help with smell prevention), radiant heat, escape routes, look-outs and sleeping spaces, officers quarters. The pictures we took really don't do it justice, because long, cool, damp tunnels underground really don't photograph well.

But we did learn a few interesting things:

• After the Boxer Rebellion (when Chinese revolted against the white imperialists they felt were polluting their land.) the land of present day Qingdao was ceded to Germany for 99 years. The German's seized upon the fact that two German missionaries were slain in the rebellion, and took up a tip of the Shandong peninsula in exchange for lost lives. Qingdao was little more than a fishing village, but it became a far East post for Germany, who was growing restless, and would become a major player in the impending world wars.
• According to documentation in the Fort, Qingdao was the only Asian battlefield in World War I. The Germans were overtaken in Qingdao by the Japanese in 1915, and the city then fell into Japanese hands. As one sign read, "The Japanese-German Qingdao war lasted two and half months.This is a war that is caused by two imperialist countries for their colonial interests in China. It brought bad disaster to Qingdao people."
• Needless to say, the German hold on Qingdao did NOT last 99 years. Their influence, however did, evidenced in beer and a penchant for building Bavarian styled buildings!