Tuckers Downunder

Whether due to her porcelain skin, those big round eyes, or China’s One Child Policy, Ivy is drawing crowds, big crowds. We stopped for a while in an area just west of Xintandia to give Ivy some milk, and within a few minutes there were 20 or so locals grinning and clucking to IHT’s great delight (DAT was less delighted, WRT went to take some pics ).  

Ivy’s been commanding a fair bit of attention since we arrived here in Shanghai and I’m not entirely sure why. Sure she’s gorgeous, but that doesn’t explain why a crowd forms whenever we stop in the street, or why when we’re on the underground everyone around needs to make eye contact. It can be unsettling, but mostly it’s flattering… There was one your guy taking photographs of Ivy on his Mobile while we were packed in on the tube, can’t say that’s happened before!

Having a great time in Shanghai, even though we

are missing Scarlett not being here. Weather has been good with 22 or 23c each day; the haze lifted on Thursday at which point we realised that we had a good view of Pudong from our room… Most of the time we’ve spent walking around (other than when I’ve been working) and as a walking city Shanghai is pretty good.   

Smiles all round…

 Kite Flying old dudes….

Flying into Pudong Airport you fly over the Donghai bridge, the longest sea bridge in the world, it’s pretty striking at over 20 miles long… That sets you up well for the pretty bazaar scale of Shanghai, the airport ups the ante! 

Once you’re in the terminal the scale of the place is incredible, you arrive half way along a single arrivals corridor that seems to stretch for over a kilometre in each direction, before getting onto the Maglev train into Shanghai itself… 

The train is spectacular partly because it feels so ordinary… Travelling at over 190 miles an hour seems pretty effortless when you’re floating on magnets; we didn’t actually get up to the top speed of 260 miles per hour, although that’s probably just as well since the entire journey only took 5 minutes as it was, anything over $3 per minute may have left me feeling slightly ripped off!

Like Bombay, Shanghai has just over 20 million inhabitants, around 90% of the population of Australia compressed into less than 0.1% of the land area 8-)… That density mixed with the new found wealth makes for a pretty impressive skyline. See below.

Leaving for Shanghai this morning, will return to Sydney next Monday.

Things are a bit different this trip as Diana and Ivy are travelling out to Shanghai on Wednesday, leaving Scarlett with Diana’s Aunt… This is all upside, all round. Scarlett will have a great time at Ujna’s house, we’ll (hopefully) have fun in Shanghai, Ivy will get lots of attention, and Diana will get to chill a bit… Sounds all good.

Leaving Scarlett behind is easy for me as I do it so often, however it’ll be hard for Diana, I’m sure having spoken with Scarlett twice or more each day she’ll realise that Scarlett prefers being at Ujna’s house, maybe that will upset her poor mummy more?

UPDATE – I can’t get this video to work, tried two different video providers and no luck – trying something  else now….

I am still out of the country but found this little video on my phone, I took it in the park last week; Scarlett is pretty fearless climbing up three or more times her height to play on the slide…. She is one scary little kitten.

here are some screen shots from the video, seems I can’t get it on the blog.

Here are the blog’s page views since the site was created. I realised that it would take some time to get back to the Page Views of around the time Ivy was born, but come on, we are trending downward badly… Tell me what’s needed to make the site more interesting and you’ve got it…

Gone for a few days to attend some meetings in Seattle… Back Saturday.

Posts may be light until I get back.

B.

Born to surf!

As predicted, Scarlett backed away from her altruistic act as bedtime loomed. The thought of going to bed with no accompanying soother became too much to bear and she asked if we would phone the dummyfairy to cancel the pick-up. Phew.

Happy to encourage Scarlett to get rid of the “dreaded” dummy in a few months, just not quite yet. But that begs a question, is she addicted to the dummy, or are we?

Scarlett announced today that she would like to give up her dummies for the “babies” (not sure which babies)?

Scarlett gathered all her precious dummies (5 I think) and took them to the back of the garden to hang on a tree with the promise that the dummy fairy, below I assume, will come collect them and leave a gift in appreciation of her generosity. 

I think that’s a terrible idea.

Firstly, the dummy comes with no cost whatsoever, well, unless you lose them, leave home without one and need her to sleep in the car, or, if it drops down the back of her bed in the middle of the night and you do that sweeping thing on the dusty floor with your hand or peer into the darkness hoping that the supposed luminescence will make the lost soother magically appear… other than those minor issues, the dummy brings only goodness, peace and quiet.

I have not yet seen a dummy wielding 5 year old and I think buck teeth come only from thumb sucking so there’s another good reason to keep them. No, the dummies are going nowhere if I can help it, and I will be out with a bat at the first sight of a dummy fairy! I’ll let you know tomorrow how it goes.

Billy.