America, brought to you by Canada

[Explanatory note to this edition of Shanghai Daddy:  I had planned to put up 25 or 30 photos, along with the links to more. Unfortunately I'm having major tech problems, and just can't load links and photos right now; there are inherent problems in using Blogger, a site that's blocked in China, from China. That VPN is killin' me.  I will keep trying to get around this, in my free time. Yeah. Thankfully a couple random photos snuck through the firewall. You should have seen the beach pics! I look buff. Maybe next time. For now, enjoy the cracklin' prose . . .]

My family took two Canadian vacations this past month. We flew from Shanghai to San Francisco with an eight-hour layover in Vancouver, far too long to crouch in an airport lounge with two toddlers. So after twelve hours in the air, we left most of our 37 oversized carry-on bags at a none-too-thrifty airport storage room and took the train to downtown Vancouver. Even coming from the US, the preternatural politeness of Canadians would have been a shock; arriving from China, it was positively jarring. People were offering us their seats, making friendly suggestions about what to see and do, conferring with one another about the best directions -- it was eerie. I mean, what did they want from us? Anyone could see this was a nation of hustlers, working the angles. Come on.

After a beautiful walk along the Sea Wall to Stanley Park, during which time Kai and Keegan succumbed to comas in their strollers,

we gave up on my brilliant plan to see the manatees at the aquarium. When the boys woke up, we had just enough time to ride the Sasquatch Train,

which according to our extremely limited poll turned out to be Vancouver’s top (not to mention only) tourist attraction. You actually get to see Sasquatch. That's him, on the left:

If you find yourself in Vancouver with two toddlers in a coma, do NOT miss it. But watch out for those Canadians. They’re crafty.

We got to SF late late that night, after a door-to door trip of 28 hours. For some reason even I don’t understand, 7 hours later I was taking off from the starting line of the San Francisco Half Marathon. I think I was trying to beat jet lag all in one fell swoop or something. HA hahahahahahahaha, haha, ha. But anyway, the race went just fine (1:56:30, thanks for asking), and the city looked great as usual. I almost overslept, but Allison woke for a minute and shooed me out. Our plan was for her to get up in a few hours and come see me cross the finish line with the boys. When I got home five hours later at about noon, she was still in bed. She fluttered her eyelids open and said, “Good luck honey! Have a great race!”  She literally thought that only a minute had passed.

Maybe it should go without saying, but we had a fantastically great time in San Francisco. Even freezing German tourists who mistakenly thought they’d be visiting sun-drenched California and have to wear souvenir shop San Francisco sweatshirts pulled down over their shorts have a fantastically great time in San Francisco. For people who lived in the city for ten years like Allison or twenty years like me, well, we enjoy it maybe even more than the Germans do. From La Taqueria in the Mission to Trattoria Contadina in North Beach,

 from AT&T Park in SF

 to the Mount Davis Colosseum in Oakland, from Ocean Beach to sunny Sausalito,

from the the Tennessee Valley in Marin to the hills of Moraga on the far side of the Caldecott, the Bay rocked. It was impossible to see everyone, and  go every place, and eat in every restaurant we wanted to, but hey, we gave it our best shot.  A thousand thanks to all (no names, only because the list is too long, but you know who you are! Except, I can’t help it, thanks Marija!).

  That’s not enough thanks, but it will have to do for now. If we didn’t get to see you, just google “Shanghai flights,” and start clicking.

We had three weeks in the US -- nearly half in SF, and the balance in a little nook I like to call Delawhere? Allison’s parents, Turk and Barbara, live near the beach in Lewes (you know, just up the coast from Rehoboth, right there on Cape Henlopen), and they hosted the four of us, graciously fitting us in to their (thankfully) sprawling home. Kai and Keegan absolutely adore their Grammy and Poppy, as well as their Aunt Liz and Uncle Peter and their cousins, Lindsey and Natalie, and it was a huge treat to have some time to connect with the whole family. When we weren’t shopping at the outlets to stock up on American products, we ate American ice cream at Dairy Queen and rode Poppy’s American jeep to the beach. Allison and I had a quick side trip to nearby Baltimore to see the Orioles play at Camden Yards (Go Owsh! That’s a little Bal’mer humor for you). We also loaded up our rented Chevy Suburban, merely the size of a modest aircraft carrier, drove onto the Lewes-Cape May Ferry, and headed to the Jersey shore with nine human beings and more stuff than Admiral Perry brought with him on the last Polar expedition. No, we did not see Snooki. We had more important things to do, like attending the third annual Cousinpalooza in Sea Isle City. The first Cousinpalooza in 2010 spilled out over a week or more; Cousinpalooza II was famously critiqued (by me) as “11 hours door to door, 29 minutes on the beach.” This year’s model, two days/one night, was a more manageable portion, but I vote for three days next time. We need more time to dig giant holes, body surf, collect shells, whack pinatas, and goof off with the cousins -- and their are a lot of them.  Kai and Keegan give CP3 two big thumbs up, and so do Allison and I.

All good things must come to an end, so we packed our seven giant suitcases, most now laden with our family-sized American expat survival supplies, and drove to DC. After a last hurrah at the Air and Space Museum to see the space shuttle, we overnighted at the airport Marriott and flew out early from Dulles, bound for Toronto on Air Canada. “Why?” is a long story that involves using frequent flyer miles on United, a partner of AC. Also, Canada is located at the North Pole (as all Americans know), so it’s on the way to Asia anyway. Sort of. But, here’s the catch, we found out that Air Canada recently decided to start charging $221 dollars per bag for luggage after the first bag. Our check of the United website had led us to believe that extra bags would be 75 bucks each, a rip-off we were prepared to deal with to get all those illicit Cheerios and Cliff Bars into China. But it turns out that Air Canada, and even Canada itself, has its own set of laws, completely separate from those of civilized nations like the US of A. The pro-price-gauging party is in power up there. Remember all those super-friendly Canadians in Vancouver? Yep, just a front. I knew it. Life lesson learned. That’ll be $663 dollars, sucka. Enjoy your Cheerios!

That brings us to our second Canadian vacation, four fabulous hours at the Toronto Airport. We resisted buying the souvenir maple syrup, no matter how good it would have tasted on those Cheerios. We weren’t going to give those Canucks the satisfaction. And then, it was just short 15-hour jaunt with two exhausted toddlers, and we were home in a jiffy.

And that’s where we are now. Home. Shanghai. Yeah, I said it. This is home, and as we approach the two-year mark, I continue to make my peace with that.

The boys are back in school -- Keegan is now at Rainbow Bridge, just in the mornings, and Kai is going to Yew Cheung International School, where the instructional language is split between English and Chinese, so his Mandarin should get a lot better this year. Keegan is riding a school bus for the first time, and so far he’s not loving it. When the bus pulls away, he cries as if wolverines are eating his pancreas. When the other parents are all trying to comfort you, you know it’s bad. We do realize that five minutes later he’s his usual chirpy self, and when he comes home at noon he’s full of tales of his adventures, but it’s still hard to watch him cry. We’re suckers. Just ask the Canadians.

Kai and Keegan aren’t the only ones going back to school -- next week, I’ll be starting the Chinese Language program at Donghua University, committing to roughly twenty hours a week of study, basically a part-time-job-sized chunk of work. After more than a year and a half of piecemeal, sporadic efforts with books, computer apps, audio, and tutors, I think I need to dig in and get more serious if I’m ever going to make real progress. In case I haven’t mentioned it, Chinese is hard. I can actually speak a fair bit of it; the problem is, I can’t understand it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to someone on the street and they seem to think, “Oh, this waiguoren speaks Chinese!”, and then they’re off to the races. I’m left standing there with my little clutch of phrases -- “I’m sorry, my Chinese is not good, please say that again, please speak more slowly...” The reaction is invariably, “Oh don’t be modest, white guy! I heard you! You get me!” and they’re off again. Yeah, that’s not workin’ for me. I need to really learn, and yes, that means learning the characters too. People who actually reach a decent level with Chinese all tell me, you can’t get past a certain point without those squiggly lines. So, in the tradition of Rodney Dangerfield and Billy Madison, I’m goin’ back to school. I’ll let you know how it goes... until then, as the jet lag finally fades, this is your Shanghai correspondent, signing off.