travelling day nine - walking and walking and walking and walking

Today's plan was to visit on of Wuhan's most famous landmarks - the Yellow Crane Tower.

 

 It was an hour bus ride there - then about a three kilometer walk.  With toddlers.  But we made it.  And it was worth it to be at a site of cultural significance.  Even if I was not quite sure what the significance was.

Our lovely hosts Scott and Kerryn

from the top of the tower - smog in the city

Annika being pulled into random photos with Chinese kids

on food street

our kids were the star attraction on food street today

Also today I had the opportunity to give a talk to about 50 parents from the kindy regarding language and speech development.  I had researched Mandarin speech sound development (Dodd 2000), and talked about Blanks levels of questioning, as well as language strategies, stuttering hints, semantic webs, early literacy and bilinguilism.  My brain had a bit of a workout answering all their questions!  It was very exciting to see so many parents interested in language development - particularly translated from a foreigner.  What great opportunities are here.

Tomorrow we make puppets.  We picked up the bodies today from the tailor at the fabric market and they look awesome.  She managed to make 27 in three days. Bring it on.

Chris' cultural tip: Apartments are the norm in China
Apartment living is very much the norm in increasingly urbanised China.  People are moving to the cities in China at a phenomenal rate, and that means high density living.  We are staying in an apartment.  4 adults and 5 kids squeezing into an apartment about half the size of our house.  But it is all normal for urban China where even the fridges are half the Australian size on average.  Houses are rare, expensive, and basically for the rich.

The normality of apartment living was brought home to me today.  I was visiting a local fellowship.  It was meeting in an apartment on the 7th floor.  The meeting was all in Chinese so I was pretty much lost, so I decided to play with the only child there - a small girl about 3 years old.  We had no common language so we took to drawing on the whiteboard together.  One thing she did draw was a "house".  It was the international language of house drawing with a triangle roof, a rectangle chimney and windows consisting of a square with a plus through the middle.  The only difference was her "house" was far taller than our usual square ones, and it had a LOT more windows.  So it was obvious that even in the international language of house drawings, apartments are the norm in China.