We were all Lost. We Were all Disheveled.

In early March, my parents, brother, and sister-in-law rolled up to Wuhan. In the week plus to follow, they would find themselves falling into a deep appreciation and intimidation of my easy-going confidence, navigation abilities, and language skills.

That's not actually true, but I don't need to tell you that.

Revision: My family came to China and helped excavate me from my growing hole of romantic solitude. We were all lost and disheveled together, as a 5-deep pack of alien llama ostriches. We also saw some of China.

It's always funny seeing how you have become accustomed to potentially bizarre, unnatural things (by your own cultural yardstick of course) by witnessing the reactions from visitors. You, as the person living in the foreign place, are able to take a step back and laugh with a sense of wonder. You regain a sense of appreciation for where you are and how you have changed to fit into the place better, even if you still really don't fit at all. I am reminded of when my parents traipsed to the West Nile of Uganda to visit me. They courageously opted to spend one night in the village with Tom and I, and the moment came when we calmly and robotically told them our small list of things to do and not to do (ever) at night:

1. Don't go outside after nightfall. The neighbor's dog will likely attack you.
2. Do pee in this night bucket. Here you go.
3. Just don't get sick at night.
4. Don't mind the shrieking, mating, rabid bats in the ceiling. Try not to touch any of the constantly dropping guano.
5. If you do use the latrine before nightfall, don't mind the large cricket-like creatures climbing all over it. It's better to see them as 'crickets.'

Our list was a normal, reasonable, uninteresting one, composed of 'guidelines' that we knew to be helpful. Seeing it from my parents' perspective, at the widening of their eyes, I was able to step back and appreciate it as at truly bizarre night-time manifesto that I'd likely never use again after leaving Uganda.

That funny, standing-back moment always happens, regardless of how different the other place is from your own. In Rome, Italy, when my friend Andrea visited, she marveled at the traffic, the gelato, the packs of policemen standing around in packs. In Laos, both my parents and Lizzie marveled at being caught in the world's largest and drunkest water fight by sheer accident of their trip timing. I marveled right along with them. Leif noticed the dream-like state that all the people in Lao seemed to exist inside of; the slow, meandering pace, the gentle atmosphere.

With my family in China, the first standing-back moment had to deal with the issue of walking and getting around. I realized, after a few days, that my inner manifesto of walking in China went something like this: "There's a bit more walking than the United States. It can be a bit tricky to...get around." When this manifesto was exposed to the outside world, it shriveled into bits of confetti, which of course it always was. "A little more walking" in China means walking 13 miles a day. "A bit tricky to get around" means that walking on a 'sidewalk' makes you feel like you are in an early 90s Mario computer game: dodging gigantic pipes and boulders, wading through puddles, dodging stunt devils pretending to be regular motorcycle commuters. One day, I had us go on a 'little walk' in the morning, which actually meant hiking up a mountain. This before we had to face the normal China day of 10 miles of walking.

Then, there was ordering at restaurants. You might not know this, since I certainly didn't think of it before coming to China (you self-absorbed-English-first-freak), but all the menus in China are in....Chinese. They all look like different variations of this:

Yep, so usually I can draw from my print literacy skills enough information to recognize that the larger red letters are categories, which I also don't understand. But at least there are categories! I know a few of the characters.

小 means small. This can be misleading, as it might just be a cute, diminutive name of a dish like "little pig smiles" which is actually an entire roasted pig.

Which leads me to:

肉 means meat.

大 means big. This gets me about as far as knowing 'small.'

So, thank GAWD for translation apps. I have several on my phone. Basically, I can take a picture of Chinese characters and it will instantly give me an approximate translation. Translations of course being total bullocks, particularly between Chinese and English. Some wires definitely get crossed each time. Sometimes it feels like an instant haiku generator written by someone on mushrooms! If you've read this blog the past 6 months, you might know that using my translation apps is one of my favorite thing to do in China. This is especially true for menus, since not only are the two languages not on speaking terms, but Chinese happens to be an especially flowery and poetic language. So, I get translations like:

"Uncle Xi's Left Boot" or "Grandma's Sweet Spit Festoons Us All" or "Single Mind Cabbage Trough" or "Propitiously Arrayed Green Sweet Heart Rinds."

And you are left with more questions than before you even saw the menu in the first place.

Here's a recent example of my instant haiku generation:

I don't generally order food by myself at Chinese restaurants. If I do go to eat Chinese, I'm usually with Chinese people, and they do all the ordering. So, it was interesting and eye-opening to be the most qualified person in my family to order food. Trying to find and order red wine in China was like looking for a horcrux! At an especially fancy hotel restaurant, I felt like we were getting closer to achieving this miracle. The woman ordered to babysit our table smiled hugely when I asked her about red wine. "Sounds like there is SOME kind of wine here," I said. Then, she came back to the table with a few handles of this stuff, none other than hard-core, 65% Chinese Baiju (whiskey), which my mom promptly slammed down (just kidding).

You never really know what you will get, and that's part of living in a place where you can't read anything. Despite this, I am proud to say that I was mostly successful at ordering us food. We ate delicious food.

Some of our amazing food experiences:

My favorite stand-back-and-marvel moment was when we went to Beijing and spent a day seeing the two biggest attractions: The Great Wall & the Forbidden City. Being able to return to these sites with my family was a huge delight to me. They are deeply worthy of returning to and seeing how a different mood or perspective can affect your experience. We made the highly unpropitious mistake of taking a tour on International Women's Day, a day when thousands of Chinese women have a holiday from work, and flock en-masse to do the exact same thing that all tourists do in Beijing: See the Forbidden City. Our visit was unpropitious for another reason: we arrived in Beijing during the two-week long government congress, which was being held in Tienanmen square which we were thus prohibited from visiting. Actually, the congress affected more than just our tour: for the duration of the congress, VPNs throughout China were attacked mercilessly; annoyed foreigners and Chinese people alike found themselves unable to access facebook and NPR.

Anyway, we skirted past the heavily-guarded square into the forbidden city, to find that everyone else in China was also there.

Let's compare my two visits to the forbidden city: One with Cuong during the least desirable time of year (mid-winter) and one with my family during Women's Day in the more favorable month of March.

If you aren't shocked by the difference, then go eat a sock covered in oyster sauce. Hilariously, most people, despite possibly visiting the forbidden city for the first time in their lives, stared more at us than they did at the majestic, ancient buildings around us. In fact, entire tour groups (maybe 50 people) would turn around from looking at the revered Dragon throne and start to talk about the wai-guo-ren (foreigners) behind them. We were more interesting than probably the most interesting ancient city I've ever been inside of. Our tour guide explained that many visitors were likely from distant parts of China and that we might, without exaggeration, be the first foreigners they have ever seen.

Here's your requisite family portrait in front of Chairman Mao's kindly visage (this is the main gate entrance for the forbidden city):

Our troop of llama-ostrich-aliens continued our tour-de-force by driving out to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. Mutianyu is the part of the wall reserved for the llama-ostrich-aliens so there were no great teeming crowds. My stepping-back-in-wonder part of the great wall was noticing how unabashedly dangerous the entire experience was, especially in comparison to the warning labels and helmets that characterize the US. The part of the wall we climbed was notably steeper where Cuong and I had been for our geriatric experience. As we ascended a particularly set of steep stairs, our guide nonchalantly told us a story about how several years back, a Canadian woman fell down these very stairs, ran into an elderly woman who was tragically killed by the force of the collision, and is now in jail. This somehow wasn't comforting. I attended so carefully to my steps that I entered a trance-like state and reached nirvana.

I didn't mention the way we got up the mountain to reach the wall, which was via ski lifts, our legs dangling over an expanse of nothing. I've been on so many flying contraptions in order to get-thy-sweet-arse-up-thee-mountain in China, and by far, this was my least favorite (until last weekend when I boarded what I can best describe as a full-length trolley bus suspended in the air by two wires with about 50 other people).

Then, we could choose to the descend the mountain by ski lift or via slide/chute. Obviously, we chose the slide option and each steered a bob-sled-like contraption down a slide that snaked down the mountain. At this point, I had my face mask on due to the bad air, and in the following picture, I look like a masked assassin behind my mom.

It was such a fun visit. Here are some of my favorite pictures:

Mom and dad in the forbidden city:

Jump shot on the wall:

Neil and Emily at the botanical gardens in Wuhan:

Emily started the 'leg lift' pose, which treated us well throughout our trip:

Neil gesturing bewitchingly and helpfully at some flowers: behold!

Some of my colleagues took my parents and I out to dinner:

Mom, dad, Neil, Emily: Who wants to write a guest post about your trip?