The French pastry shop was an interesting fusion of French and Chinese. They had chicken curry croissants, (my favorite) pork floss baguette, sweet mushroom tarts and one strange coffee combo that I didn’t try: a blue cheese latte.  Call me a square.  I ordered a regular old cappuccino.

Our hotel in Shanghai was huge, it was bigger than our apartment in New York and it was located right near People’s Square Park which was the first place we went to, after skipping the blue cheese latte.  The park was amazing, I didn’t expect a park like that in the center of a city with a population nearing 20 million.  It was clean; perfectly landscaped and maintained with lakes, bridges and 4 major museums.  We spent the early morning there walking around waiting for the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall to open.

I loved everything about Shanghai, it felt like a city in real motion.  The push forward there is so strong, so many things are changing forever.  In many ways it’s frightening and I couldn’t stop thinking about how it must seem to the millions of old folks who have been living in the same neighborhoods for decades suddenly seeing their facing block getting demolished and a luxury shopping center glittering in its place.  It’s pretty sad for them I would think, and very difficult for the impoverished people who are getting left behind, built around and forced out of the city.  These scenes are everywhere and you can see the change happening it’s so fast.

We walked out of the French Concession, out of a street where people still washed their clothes in plastic buckets in a shared alleyway, and sat on the street in their pajamas playing chess or eating lunch together and looked up to a new gated development across the street towering above the scale of the neighborhood with the bold title of “Richgate.”  It was mostly inhabited by foreigners and close to the outrageously expensive western-style shopping area Xintiandi.  We spent a few minutes there because of a recommendation from a friend but quickly realized it wasn’t what we were here to see.  It did show me the amazing level of luxury and refinement that China could offer, it was really well done and so very out of place..for now.

I couldn’t get enough of Shanghai and I forced everyone out of the hotel room bright and early and stayed out pushing forward all day until dark fell before returning back again.  I wanted to make sure we went everywhere, ate and saw everything.  I had made some pretty well researched lists of activities organized by district and we managed to do them all, except we never made it to the expo.  shocking.  We could have gone but on the day we planned to go, so did 1.3 million other people and while we were having lunch before taking a taxi to the site, we spoke with a woman who told us the lines were 3-9 hours long to enter the pavilions.  So, we did something else instead and didn’t look back.

From Shanghai we took the bus to a small canal town called Zhujiajiao and it was not what we expected.  I hesitated on this part of the planning and should have listened to myself but at least I only allowed one half day and one night there.  The guest house seemed so nice online, and the guy who ran it was friendly.  The website was professional and it boasted “European standards” alongside pretty pictures of clean rooms.  When we got there, after finding the right unmarked doorway down a narrow and dark corridor, nobody was there.  The doors were open, and I let myself in, but it was not what I had hoped for.  It wasn’t the worst place I have ever stayed but the plywood mattress wasn’t the softest board either.  The boys were happy to have a bug net tent on the floor for their shared bed but they did surprisingly notice the difference in living standards that they are accustomed to.  They asked nicely to go back to the other hotel.  We made it through, and it was just fine because I knew that the next day we would be moving into the most comfortable part of our trip (because I had made all of the reservations).

We hired a taxi from Zhujiajiao to Suzhou and arrived at our 5 star luxury hotel in the early afternoon.  It was raining but that was nice because we needed a break from the pace of Shanghai and the accumulated grime of Zhujiajiao.  We spent the rest of the day relaxing in our perfect room and the boys finally got the luxury of watching  cartoons in Chinese.  The hotel was wonderful, our window looked out onto a large Chinese garden with a big old pagoda and in the morning the breakfast buffet was full of pancakes, waffles, sausages, and 100 other things to choose from.

In Suzhou we spent our time seeing the classical Chinese gardens that the city is known for.  Bertram was really into it all and he pretty much drove this part of the trip.  It was great to see all of this together and to see the gardens through his eyes too, they were particularly special to him and I liked that.  My favorite garden was called “The Humble Administrator’s Garden” and I guess it’s also the most famous, but for good reason.  It was large and sprawling and had an incredible bonsai garden attached to it that must have housed over 200 perfectly maintained bonsai.  The whole garden was so pleasant, it was really heavenly.  We stayed there for an entire day, from morning until sunset.

We saw gardens and Suzhou leisurely for 5 days and slept luxuriously for 6 nights and then took the bus to Hangzhou.  For an unknown reason, West Lake in Hangzhou is relatively unheard of outside China.  For this reason I was skeptical when I read about its charms before seeing it myself.  I totally underestimated its potential for our vacation.  I thought to myself “it’s only a lake, how can we spend more than an hour looking at it, let alone go there for several days?”  Boy was I wrong.  I wished so much that I had given us more time there, I had no idea it would be the place of my dreams.  At West Lake there was nothing that got in the way, no McDonald’s across the street to ignore, no tourist trap junk shops lining the boardwalk around the lake, no unfortunate architecture blaring out at you… there were little islets of perfectly manicured gardens at one end of the lake linked together by beautiful bridges and lightly spotted with pleasant local cafes and small restaurants. There were pedestrian walkways that crossed the lake, lined by trees and grass and smiling people. You could escape the cars and still be essentially in the city. It was really flawless everywhere and I have never seen that before. It was a place of undisturbed ultimate perfection, but not in a wasteful or indulgent way, in a peaceful and harmonious way. You can spend days, years, there I’m sure and continue to feel that way. It’s not only the lake either; around the lake are forests and mountains that extend the undisturbed beauty.  We climbed a small mountain by carved rock stair steps with the boys, to the top of a pagoda where we could see the whole city sitting beyond the lake.  We sat there on these huge rocks in the warm sun staring over this faraway place with the memories of so many pleasant days behind us.  I felt so happy there atop so much beauty, and so happy that I could share this view with the boys.

To see all the pictures from our trip, copy and paste this link to my slideshow on Facebook.  You can view it even if you’re not on FB, and please let me know if it doesn’t work:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2087666&id=1563038992&l=e70b0d7b44

This evening Lucas was in the bathtub and we have this glass shower door that runs three-quarters of the length of the tub.  About one-third of the door is hinged so that you can reach the faucet easily by swinging it open.  Lucas wanted to close the door to the tub and he reached out to close it and had the thumb of his other hand in the gap between the fixed glass part and the door.  I have never experienced so intensely a desire to take pain for another person who is hurting.  As he screamed I wanted so badly to feel it for him instead.  I felt like I couldn’t help him.  His thumb quickly turned blue and purple under the nail and the backside skin had opened but there was no blood.  I know it is not broken but it is badly bruised and will take quite some time to heal.  It happened right before bedtime and I gave him a generous dose of Tylenol hoping to help him sleep.  I am assuming that he will end up sleeping in our bed around 3am.  I went in to check on him just minutes ago and he has fallen asleep gripping his thumb with his other hand.

Today I bought tickets to China.  We have been pondering a vacation for a while now and have tossed around several ideas, but as I kept in mind a budget and researched different options, nothing was really coming together.  Yesterday, I saw a picture from the World Expo of this amazing pavilion designed by a group of british architects and I wanted to see it in person.  I also have just been wanting to go to China and it seems like a perfect time to go.  It is a 10 hour flight from here, but the time zone only changes by two hours so there is almost no jet lag.  It is also an affordable direct flight from Sydney.  And with the Expo, it all made sense.  I went to a Chinese travel agency in Chinatown today and got great prices on flights to Shanghai.  We’ll be leaving on October 13 and staying 15 days.  We’ll travel around and see some other cities outside of Shanghai as well.  I’ll keep you updated on the plans as I carve them out over the next few weeks.

I took the boys to the mall today to profit from the heaters there.  I let them each choose a cupcake and then browse the toy isles at Target.  I think we hovered around there for nearly an hour and a half.  gasp.  and we walked out with a new book  (Lucas found a book with a steering wheel on it, and I wanted to please him) and some batteries.  Eliot was happy with the pack of batteries and a branch that he had been carrying around all afternoon.  He often finds and holds onto sticks for entire days.

I haven’t written on here in a while because I’ve been working part-time.  I’ve been really busy.  I’ve begun learning some new 3D rendering software and I also took on a photo project that turned out to be pretty intense.  My Mom was here, and helped me survive it all, and then when she left, I was in a bit of a shock dealing with all of my usual responsibilities again. But now it’s OK.  I have figured out how to run the dishwasher again.

Since we moved here I’ve been reading about the colonial history of this city at the NSW library and in the book ‘The Colony’ by Grace Karskens.  The history of Sydney is inseparable from the histories of the Hawksbury and the Blue Mountian regions so I had to go there and see them for myself.   Basically, once Governor Phillip and his criminal labor force realized that the land that is now The Royal Botanical Gardens (Farm Cove) in Sydney was unfit for farming, they looked North-West and relocated their effort to Paramatta.  In a very very general sense, as a criminal transported to Sydney, you were often given a certain sentence during which you had to learn to work the land before being emancipated.  Once emancipated, you were given a parcel of land, the size of which was determined by the number  of your dependents.  You were then expected to live, and feed your family by farming your own land, thus freeing the crown from providing for you.  It didn’t always work out this way, but that was the general plan.  Many convicts, once emancipated took land on the Hawksbury River Valley.  It was fertile and far enough away to be independent of governmental control.  And thus, in this region” Australian” culture was born.   It was a loosely organized lawless inter-cultural criminal society left to make it’s own rules and economy on the banks of the Hawksbury.  The only obstacle they had were the Aborigines, who had been living on the land for 80,000 years.   There is a wonderful novel based on the life of Solomon Wiseman that I have just finished reading called ‘The Secret River’ by Kate Grenville.  It is a story of his transport from England in the early days of the colony, and eventually about local interaction with the Aboriginal population of the Hawksbury.  I highly recommend it if you want to learn about early colonial history in New South Wales, and read a beautiful novel at the same time.

The next morning we drove towards the town we would sleep in that night on a mountain road that strung together incredible views and small country towns.  It was breathtaking, magical.  We had lunch on a deck overlooking a deep valley of rivers and trees, spotted with colors of Fall and late summer flowers.  It was peaceful and the boys were happy.  The boys were happy the whole time in fact, they were so good.  Every restaurant experience was good, every night we all slept, they didn’t whine in the car, they were gems.

The next morning we went to Thomas the Train on the Zig Zag railway in Clarence, NSW.  It was another big success.  I was surprised by the amount of effort they put into making this an authentic experience for the kids.  At ‘Pitt Bottoms’, the bottom of the zig-zag line, they had set up a Thomas themed carnival inside one of the Train Stations.  I have never seen the boys so happy in my life.  Eliot was shreaking in delight, that’s what he does when he fills up with happiness, he just bubbles over.  It’s adorable.  The pictures tell some of the story, the rest was just a fabulous time that we all needed.

Click here to see all the pictures from the trip.