Up until now, Danny hasn't said more than a few sentences at a time and almost always spoke in a whisper except when he was playing with Eva and Kai. All that seemed to change today. Perhaps surviving his first airplane trip (which he had to live through with only very minimal explanation of what was going on)has emboldened him. Today, he gave me a 5 minute dissertation on lions. It was very detailed and passionate and seemed to talk about some differences between mother and father lions, the babies, lions' sharp claws and teeth, and possibly a couple of different lion attacks on people. This was followed by a 5 minute one-sided discussion about the skyline of Guangzhou and everything going on outside our hotel window. I tried to participate with a number of ohh's, hmm's and head nods. I also threw down all the relative Mandarin I could come up with - primarly "here", "there", "this", "that", "big", "small" and "blue". I also managed to work in a couple of numbers.
Danny asked me to go for a walk, so we are off to explore a bit. I imagine that he wants to walk around while he tries to sort through why he got the parents that are clearly incapable of basic conversational language and have a distinct inability to find food that is spicy enough for his palate.
And... as I am finishing this up, I'm pretty sure he's trying to teach me the names of the days of the week. Maybe there's a little bit of hope for me yet!
4 comments:
He should have had the dumplings we had last night. So spicy I had heartburn. We arrive in Guangzhou tomorrow night. I can't wait!
LOVE it! If anyone can do it, Mary can! you'll have to break out the Rosetta Stone when you get home. You can study together! In a pinch, I'm sure Kim can help with translation :-)
Very funny ... Didn't realize that you had a flair for writing among your many other talents!
This is wonderful, Mary. Nice to have some one on one time too. X X O O
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