Bloody Toes

China can feel a bit crazy sometimes.  We are out of our home for the evening, because of mold growing on the walls of the girls’ bedroom.  Rather than simply staying at the hotel across the street, we’ve skipped town to stay at the Le Meridien hotel in a large park just outside of town.  It has a lake, an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, grounds for walking and plenty of playgrounds.  Unfortunately, just as the girls were growing brave in the outdoor pool, a storm arose and has not left.  No problem - we moved our play to the indoor pool, held our picnic on the floor of our spacious hotel room, and are now watching Snow White.  But in the midst of that, we went for a little hotel exploration and discovered that although Le Meridien is an international chain, this is still China.  The glass foyer full of two-story windows and a glass ceiling barely kept out the rain.  Plants had been cleverly placed to hide the drips falling from every seam in the roof.  We reached the end of the hallway, and decided that the drips outside weren’t much worse than those inside.  We tried each door, and found that all of the exits in this whole hallway were locked.  Good thing we weren’t running from a fire!

We found a door which allowed us to leave the building, and explored the rainy grounds.  The terrace next to the lake held water up to our ankles, and the walkway near the pool was so slippery that I fell in.  Well, I didn’t fall into the pool - that would have been funny.  I fell into the cute little moat surrounding the pool and left a mighty gash on my toe.

For the first year or so of my life in China, when something bad happened to me I immediately blamed China.  I began to forget that unfortunate occurrences take place anywhere in the world.  Now that China is more fully my home, my dander rarely rises over simple mistakes.  But sometimes it becomes strikingly apparent that in China, most projects are done almost right.