Southern Culture

This blog post is probably not what you're expecting. I'm not talking about American grits and mashed potatoes with gravy here. I'm talking about the culture we just experienced from Hong Kong and the Southern part of the country we live in. (We made it back yesterday, by the way, and the initial reports about Archie's eye surgery are good.)

Never seen bamboo scaffolding before but it was EVERYWHERE in Hong Kong. Seems sturdy enough? Wonder if the pandas are upset. Did you know an adult panda eats about 18 pounds of bamboo a day? Would you want to crawl around on that?

The first few days we were in Hong Kong we couldn't find the market. I mean, we found a super crowded grocery store with some imports but not a nice open market like we're used to. I felt like I was home when I ran across this.

In the mornings everywhere you looked outside there were crowds of older people doing their Tai Chi and other exercises. TONS of them!

I love this picture because it is so revealing about cultural differences. We took a side trip to Shenzhen (a very developed Chinese city across the border from Hong Kong) on our way home. Everywhere we go, our white children always attract a crowd. See the photographers capturing Archie's antics on video. I also enjoy the guy to the far right of the picture with his shirt rolled up. This is a very common way for men to stay cool here. (People always call Grace a "foreign doll" and I nearly cracked up when Archie informed the crowd that he was a foreign doll, too.)

This next picture is a restaurant down south featuring food from our neck of the woods. Typically, food from the South and middle parts of our country is more popular around the world so I thought this was pretty funny. I think the waitresses were a little surprised to run into a foreigner from the same place as this restaurant! Didn't eat there. Figured we got enough food from our hometown. Opted for some frog on rice from the place next door. The flavor was fine but a little bony for my tastes.