Trip to the bookstore
This afternoon after lunch Myles and I took a cab to the area around the Haiya department store. There is a huge bookstore near there, and I was on a mission for bilingual children's books.
One of the ways I had to keep Myles interested in the trip was the promise of a new toy car and the opportunity to paint Dinosaurs. This bookstore has a "DIY" section in the children's department where you can buy a not-too-challenging art kit for your child to take home or work on right there. Needless to say, most work on them right then and there. We had been here before, on a Saturday afternoon during the Labor Day Holiday, and the place was crazy. Myles had to wait to get a seat to work on his project, glow-in-the-dark plastic dinosaurs that he could paint with fluorescent paint. Today we were the only people in that section, something Myles found scary in that last-person-in-the-world way. He kept asking, "Where are the kids? Where are all the kids?"
So here he is happily painting MORE dinosaurs.
I was also able to buy two sets of English/Putonghua (pinyin and characters) flashcards. I have already admitted that they were for both Myles and me. This evening while we waited for Daddy on the porch at Mary's Bar, one of the bartenders went through some of the cards with me. It's bad enough all the homonyms in Chinese; even the words that aren't real homonyms sound alike to me. Guo and Gua, for instance, sound alike to me, and they are related. One is the word for fruit, the other melon. I thought they were the same word before today, and pronounced them both as Gua, or I guess you could say I used Gua even when Guo was the appropriate word.
And we also bought a Make Way for Noddy book and VCD that is bilingual. Noddy is oddly big here. We try to watch it every morning when it is on one of the children's channels (both carry it, but I can only remember when one of them shows it). The theme song is in English but the story is overdubbed. Sometimes Myles even recognizes the story. It isn't my favorite, but for some reason it makes Myles really excited that Noddy is here.
Another mission of mine today was to find some English language books. I had heard that this store had some, though on our previous visit we were unable to locate them. There were in fact some, but none that I wanted. Some "World's Best Poetry" in English and Chinese. "World's Greatest Speeches" in English and Chinese. And a few different printings of Gone With the Wind. I did see what I thought was a section of foreign-language classice (which includes English), but on closer inspeciton only the titles were in English, or Russian, or even Greek. Needless to say, it was like the greatest hits of public domain.
One of the ways I had to keep Myles interested in the trip was the promise of a new toy car and the opportunity to paint Dinosaurs. This bookstore has a "DIY" section in the children's department where you can buy a not-too-challenging art kit for your child to take home or work on right there. Needless to say, most work on them right then and there. We had been here before, on a Saturday afternoon during the Labor Day Holiday, and the place was crazy. Myles had to wait to get a seat to work on his project, glow-in-the-dark plastic dinosaurs that he could paint with fluorescent paint. Today we were the only people in that section, something Myles found scary in that last-person-in-the-world way. He kept asking, "Where are the kids? Where are all the kids?"
So here he is happily painting MORE dinosaurs.
I was also able to buy two sets of English/Putonghua (pinyin and characters) flashcards. I have already admitted that they were for both Myles and me. This evening while we waited for Daddy on the porch at Mary's Bar, one of the bartenders went through some of the cards with me. It's bad enough all the homonyms in Chinese; even the words that aren't real homonyms sound alike to me. Guo and Gua, for instance, sound alike to me, and they are related. One is the word for fruit, the other melon. I thought they were the same word before today, and pronounced them both as Gua, or I guess you could say I used Gua even when Guo was the appropriate word.
And we also bought a Make Way for Noddy book and VCD that is bilingual. Noddy is oddly big here. We try to watch it every morning when it is on one of the children's channels (both carry it, but I can only remember when one of them shows it). The theme song is in English but the story is overdubbed. Sometimes Myles even recognizes the story. It isn't my favorite, but for some reason it makes Myles really excited that Noddy is here.
Another mission of mine today was to find some English language books. I had heard that this store had some, though on our previous visit we were unable to locate them. There were in fact some, but none that I wanted. Some "World's Best Poetry" in English and Chinese. "World's Greatest Speeches" in English and Chinese. And a few different printings of Gone With the Wind. I did see what I thought was a section of foreign-language classice (which includes English), but on closer inspeciton only the titles were in English, or Russian, or even Greek. Needless to say, it was like the greatest hits of public domain.
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