Marco Polo

Stick and I took our niece Isabel to the pool today. We played a pick-up game of Marco Polo, with some neighborhood kids, and watched a hundred thousand times as Isabel’s cried “Watch this! Look at me!”

It was fantastic, a day of brilliant blue skies with puffy white Disney clouds, and trees in all directions. Not the straight rows of matching new saplings, but older trees, with different leaves and different shapes, and some Southern summer flowers. I sat in the sun, half-listening to conversations around me, and my eavesdropping gets me neighborhood gossip, not the “Three… not have… tomorrow” my Mandarin skills glean.

I feel strange, though, like I am impersonating an American.  I’m constantly off-balance, lost without the ring roads and the nei / wai style of Beijing navigation, having strange mornings without the shouts of recycling pick-up and my daily ChinesePod.

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0 Responses to Marco Polo

  1. dugger says:

    Meg,
    Lovely site and I especially enjoy your writing style. Proof positive that you don’t have to pound out an essay every day to share something meaningful with the rest of us. Welcome home.
    Dugger.

  2. John says:

    How long had you been away? For me, it’s a different feeling every time I go home. The last time I had been away for about 26 months.

    I always forget that you’re a ChinesePod listener. (You never comment, right?) That, at least, can still be a part of your daily life…

  3. Meg says:

    @ Duggar — Thanks so much!

    @ John — I’m a dedicated ChinesePod listener! Almost every day! But I put the ChinesePod lessons on my iPod to listen on the bus or subway, so I’m never near the computer to comment.

    I’ve been in China almost a year, which is about as long as I was in Yantai, but coming home doesn’t feel easier the second time around.

  4. Meg says:

    PS John — Do you have some kind of Google Alert for “I haven’t been doing my ChinesePod”?!?!?

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