Random Musings and Nicknacks

I got up very early this morning, excited about checking my mom out of the hospital. The doctor in charge has agreed to release my mom from the hospital after Uncle Dong’s visit. However, I still want to confirm if this is the case with other doctors. I had the taxi booked; the driver was the one who took Uncle Dong back to ShuCheng yesterday. He was to pick me up at the hotel around 9:00 am. In the morning, decided that I wanted to get in the hospital earlier. I called the driver around 7:00am to see if he could meet me around 8:00 am. He happily agreed.

When we arrived in the hospital, my mom had everything packed already. She was sitting at the bed waiting – I could see the light in her eyes even though she looked calm and indifferent. She told me that the doctors and nurses have already confirmed that they are preparing the files for her checkout – what a relief!!!

Monday is the busiest day of a week in a typical chinese hospital; doctors usually gather together in Monday morning to discuss the critical cases they had in the previous week and then they will visit every room to check the patients there. It took us 3 hours waiting and finally we got out of the hospital around 11:00 am. This is usually the time for my mom having lunch. I suggested stopping somewhere for lunch – my mom rejected the idea. She insisted having lunch at home. I managed to convince her to have a banana. After all, It is an hour and a half drive; I really don’t want her to starve.

The trip went smoothly. I have to give the credit to the driver: he drove the car carefully and I didn’t have many heart attacks – we arrived in ShuCheng around 12:30 pm and the lunch was on the table already.

Now my goal is to survive the next 5 days in ShuCheng without mom having any relapse.

My plan is to have my mom checked out of the hospital tomorrow (May 17): her condition is stable enough now to apply medication from home. The doctors also believe that she recovered well. They keep telling me that she can be out of the hospital in a few days. Don’t fall into a trap here – if you are told that something is going to happen in a few days here, it actually can take place in a few weeks or months before you realize what that means. My job here is to make sure that a few days is equal to “Monday May 17, 2010″.

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I successfully attended the meeting through Skype this morning and I felt sooooooo great! I said hi to my colleagues via Skype as well; this was definitely a memorable experience in my life. With everything else going on here, the energy and excitement I felt through the meeting surely boosted my spirit.

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I have to think really hard to remember what happened on May 14. The confusion with dates never went away.

I felt exhausted in the morning after more than 8 hours of remote login to work. There was an all hands staff meeting scheduled on Friday (Vancouver time) to celebrate the acquisition of Bycast.

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Today is the forth day in Hefei – It felt so long ago and it felt that I have been in the city forever. I went to the hospital this morning for a short visit. I need to be back before noon. Today is the check-out day and I have to move to Holiday Inn Hefei. I only booked 3 days with Hilton Hefei before I left Vancouver. My original plan was to extend the stay if needed; however, my plan was aborted – the city is hosting the national sports competition event and Hilton was sold out after I arrived.

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Walking home from school

When I woke up this morning, I heard the news of the earthquake in Sichuan and how a school full of kids collapsed.

Although it was a completely different area and nobody I met would have been involved, my thoughts immediately leapt to those school kids in Anhui, and how little difference there must have been between them and the ones in the disaster area.

My thoughts and prayers are with all those affected.

Uncle Dong

It is time to talk about my Uncle Dong. That is the way I see him — he’s not a good friend of Ling’s family — I have an Uncle Dong the same way I have an Aunt Carol. The last thing he told me before we left was that when I got home I had to tell my parents and my grandparents that they didn’t know it, but we have an Uncle in Shu Cheng.
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Breakfast, I could get used to this! We brought the french press into the restaurant ourselves, though

I am generally not a very picky eater. I will eat most anything, my rules are fairly simple: no raw tomatoes, no heads, and no feet. Basically I don’t want it to look like it came from an animal when it gets to the table (fish being one exception). If I don’t know what it is, let me eat it first, then tell me.

Fortunately I have been able to avoid tomatoes, which I am completely incapable of eating, but all of my other rules have now been broken. Not only did I eat some very unusual stuff by my standard, but there were distinctly head and foot parts in a number of things.
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He’s not looking at the camera

Now that I am in Shanghai, waiting to fly home tomorrow morning, I worry that I may addicted to being a celebrity. Am I going to walk down the street in Vancouver demanding that people stare at me? Offering to give random strangers autographs? How am I going to handle the withdrawal symptoms now that I am no longer famous?
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I ate both of these, not really sure what they were!

We are wrapping up our time in Anhui. Not counting breakfasts (which we ate in the hotel, carrying a french press full of coffee into the restaurant with us; that created quite a stir while the staff tried to figure out what it was) we have been here for 10 meals. Of those 3 have been at Ling’s parent’s place, the other 7 I have been taken out for a formal meal, once in the hotel we are staying in, once in a nice rural restraurant and 5 times in the “Safety Hotel”.

I can imagine the staff beginning to wonder just who I am, as I walk up with another group of people every time.
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