I'd better wrap up my posts about our summer vacation before the first snows fall. I've covered our trip to Shaanxi Province, where we took in the terra cotta warriors and the revered-by-Communist-nostalgia buffs hideout of Mao and his cronies before they busted out and took over the country. (To the left, the Chairman and his notorious fourth wife, in happier times, as the Daily Mail would say, in Yan'an.)  

​I've just sampled Red Star Over China, by the way, and Edgar Snow's writing style is so breezy and engaging that I think I'll continue reading it, even though it's Commie agitprop. While travelling to Yan'an, I was trying to visualize what it would have been like at the time of the war, and I can travel along with Edgar Snow and experience it through his eyes.

Ross and I also made a brief trip to the seaside city of Weihai, where we had a delicious seafood dinner and enjoyed some walks along the waterfront. Weihai has a lot of factories that make fishing poles and tackle, too. We noticed that swimming suits in China are very modest compared to Western or South American standards. Bottom left, some kids at the restaurant watching the fish. Bottom right, boy, that octopus was amazing...

I've blogged previously about our visit to Xi'an, home of the famous terra cotta warriors. We also took a two-day escorted tour bus trip to Yan'an, the remote city where Mao and the surviving remnants of the Communist Army collected after the harrowing Long March and established a base to essentially wait out the Second World War. 


The bus trip was an all-Chinese affair except for Ross and me. The tour guide was worried about what to do with us at first, but I was confident that some other tourist on that bus would speak enough English to translate the vital bits to us, like "be back on the bus by 2:00."

And we were right. We were seated right behind Carol, a charming lady on vacation with her family who kept us in the loop. And while our cute young tour guide could talk -- and talk -- to her captive audience, we already knew enough about Yan'an and Mao's time there to understand what we were seeing.

Two of my Chinese friends are expecting their first babies in August.* I don't envy them going through their third trimester in the humid, sticky heat of a Shandong summer. But if your conception of Chinese maternity care was derived from novels like The Good Earth, where the peasant wife toils in the fields all day, then delivers her baby by herself, you might be quite surprised to learn about the regime my friends will undergo after they've given birth. 

In ideal conditions (that is, if you are not in the middle of the Long March or something), Chinese women rest and recuperate for a full 40 days, while being waited on hand and foot...