May Day Holiday

May Day Holiday is also known as Labor's Day in China. People usually get the first week in May off for this national holiday and go traveling to different places.

John and I flew to Qingdao to meet his parents there. We spent the day there, visiting friends and going to the tailor's. My best friend from college Julia came all the way from her hometown Weifang (which is about 3 hours drive from Qingdao) to see John and I. She brought us so many gifts that we don't know how to take them back to the US. John got a summer suit made. It cost us 50 something US dollars. Mom and Paul also got some stuff made. We'll show you pictures later.

The next day, we took a bus to go to my house. The 3-hour long bus ride turns out to be not so pleasant. The bus is old and shaggy and the driver honks every time he passes other cars, which turns out to be every 2 minutes. And China's having a shortage on diesel because the driver had to stop at three places before he could spend his money on gas. Mom tries to tell him it'd use more gas to honk the horn, but I didn't think the idea got crossed.

But we made it and got home where my almost-whole extended family were waiting to meet the parents. Mom cooked up a feast and we never stopped eating for the rest of the time we were there.

About 30 or more people showed up to see John and his parents. They just stared at them and talked away. Mostly things like, "oh they look nice." "oh they have very white skin, so pretty..." "Oh John looks like his mom a lot." "Look, John's joking around with his mother..." Ya know, things like that. And of course, everybody, especially my 90-year-old grandma keeps telling them to take care of me and keeps saying how thankful they were that I married into a nice family. Well I did. John gave grandma a little massage, which made her so happy. He spoke a lot more Chinese this time, which made everyone so impressed, especially my parents. They know now there is hope :-)

We went back to Qingdao and played on the beach. It was a nice day. For dinner we called up an old friend of mine, Jim Ely (I know him through Max and Deanna) and he recommended this nice little German restaurant. We met my cousin Megan and her boyfriend there and had a very nice German dinner. We're trying to help Megan to get into BYU to get an MBA degree.

We flew back to Shanghai the next morning and went straight to our training meeting at the Berlitz school. We're expecting John's parents to arrive tomorrow. We'll spent several days together in Shanghai and then they'll be on their way home.

Summer's definitely in Shanghai. We're wearing short sleeves and still sweating.

Here's a link to some of our pictures from our trip.
http://picasaweb.google.com/HobblyJig/MayDayHoliday