The Larson Family Shanghai Page

For one of her after school activities, Emma signed up for Chinese folk dance.  After several weeks of practicing, she got to dress up in a costume and do a performance for the parents.

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Here in China you can buy whole pineapples on the street for about 60 cents.  The pineapples come with a really cool spiral cut patter carved into them.  Tracey and bought one in February and watched the guy do it right in front of us, and he used two tools– a “slicer” which is like a giant potato peeler, which slices off the outside skin, and then a “groover” which is used to cut the dimples out that the peeler didn’t get.  Since the dimples naturally occur in diagonal lines in a pineapple, cutting them out from top to bottom gives you the really “groovy” pattern.

So, on Tracey’s birthday we went with our driver to a local fruit and vegetable market to pick up some goods.  At one of the fruit stalls, we bought two pineapples and then we saw some of these tools sitting out.  In my very best Mandarin (i.e., really rough), I tried to tell our driver that we wanted to know where we could buy tools like these, since they didn’t seem to be available in any of the regular stores we had ever been to.  Pretty soon our driver and the store owner were talking back and forth, and the shopkeeper seemed to think something was really funny.  Finally, our driver handed us the tools, said “shi quai” (10 RMB, about $1.40) and we were the proud owners of our very own set of used pineapple cutters.

Here are the results of my first attempt at using them:

Since that time, our driver has helped us get a brand new set of pineapple tools (20 RMB) so the first set will be retired as keepsakes.   The big cutter is made by hand (you can tell from the construction) and the old set even has Chinese characters stamped into it, maybe the signature of the metalworker who made it.

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Easter Sunday in Shanghai was an enjoyable experience.  The Easter Bunny managed to import some candy and plastic eggs, in addition to an Easter egg dye kit.  We also had a few good sessions of scripture reading to help the children remember the true meaning of Easter.

Eric had a great time coloring easter eggs.  The challenge here was finding eggs that were white to begin with– most of the eggs at the grocery store are some shade of brown.

When the eggs were almost done, we asked Ahua if she wanted to color an egg.  Normally she is very shy and reserved about doing social things with the family, but she surprised us all by enthusiastically agreeing to make an egg.  Here we see Emma and Ahua showing off their creations.

On Sunday morning, all of the kids (including Tino) hunted for their plastic eggs.  Then we got ready for church and it was picture time.

With a four year old boy in the house, the biggest challenge for posed photos is getting a normal looking shot of everyone.  Most of the time, however, we get something like this.

After several more whiffs, we finally managed to get this shot and called it good.  The girls all look beautiful in their new Chinese style dresses. 

After church, Tino and Tracey paused to pose in the courtyard of our apartment complex.  We tried a few more shots of the family, and wound up with some more good shots of Emma and Eric causing problems.

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In addition to Tino’s visit and our trip to Xi’an, the last week of March brought Heidi and Tracey’s birthdays.  Heidi has officially reached double digits now and considers herself a “zeroteen.”  Heaven help us all.

Mom, meanwhile, slid gracefully past another year and is still firmly entrenched somewhere in the 30’s.  Eric wanted to know where all her presents were.  Truth be told, she’s just been buying them at the fabric market for the past 2 months and then wearing them.  But to make him happy, she put a couple of things in a gift bag and “opened” them in front of the family. 

Heidi is a big fan of panda bears. <rimshot>

Blowing out the candles in the traditional bowl of birthday white chocolate mousse.

Girls sing, boy hugs, mom happy.

We wanted to get mom a traditional Chinese dessert, but since candles in watermelon would look weird, we got her a caramel cheesecake instead.