The Flower at my heart

So my internet connection here in Ping Quan is dial up and takes FOREVER to load anything so pictures are hard. But this first picture is of Mimi. She is the little girl whom I am staying with. She is eleven years old and speaks with a serious lisp. This was taken fairly early in the morning before most people were up and about, but this is one of the main streets. Ping Quan is "small" by Chinese standard. It has probably 100,000 people in it but when compared to all of the FIFTY plus cities in China that have over one million people it is one of the smallest. There is still a haze in the morning from all the coal smoke at night. Most of the people ride bikes or walk and they walk in the streets. There are no traffic laws, or so it would seem. Cars are so new that nobody has really learned the importance of sticking to traffic laws. Even in Beijing stop lights, lines on the road and medians are not even suggestions but obstacles to be overcome. Some of my taxi drivers would jump medians and drive on the wrong side of the road to bypass slower traffic.

This next picture is of the family who owns a restaurant that I ate in. They all wanted to sit with us and then take their picture with me. The owner of the restaurant pasted my picture on the wall of his restaurant like I was someone famous.

The trip back to Ping Quan from Beijing was a nightmare!! There are very few things that I will say that I honestly hate and the bus from Beijing to Cheng De just became part of that very exclusive list. So the bus is a tin cylindrical mini van with no heating or air circulation of any sort. We were driving through a DARK negative 20 degree night with so many people crammed into the bus that half of the people are sitting on top of each other and a bunch are standing in the stairwell. The trip to Cheng De takes five hours and as the drivers in China have no real respect for rules of the road we were barreling into oncoming traffic and then swerving at the last moment as both drivers honk at each other. Keep in mind that Chinese people only shower and wash their clothes once a week, AND they only BRUSH THEIR TEETH once a week AND they smoke constantly but nobody wants to open a window because it is so cold outside. The Chinese diet consists of LARGE amounts of garlic and onion so you can imagine the air in that bus. So we are trapped in with this stagnant air for five hours. YUCK!

After the bus dropped me off in Cheng De I had to find a taxi to take me to Ping Quan. The driver knew a few questions in English and tried them out on me. We had an interesting Chinglish conversation aided heavily by my dictionary. As we got closer to Ping Quan he asked if I had any children, if I was married etc and kept looking back at me. Then he said, "You are the flower at my heart." I had no idea what he was talking about so I said thank you and got out. He didn't want me to pay. I told Cui Guo Hua that he said I was the flower at his heart and asked what that meant. He laughed so hard and told me that those are the words of a song and he was confessing a "very serious" love for me. Cui Guo Hua now teases me constantly about "my boyfriend, the taxi driver."