I am here to discuss the eighteenth of May, a date of nine days ago, and a Saturday.
WHY do I want to talk about the eighteenth, you ask?
Patience, patience...
(NOTE FROM RICK: A child car seat in China is a mom's arms wrapped around their children. A good car seat in America is around is around $150 here in China for a good car seat it cost around $450. I have not driven a manual transmission for about 10 years, but he did really well.)
But first, we filled up on cake and popcorn. :D
AND we had lunch.
And a most delicious lunch it was. There were noodles, more noodles, tofu, bean curd (I think that's what it's called), fatty meat, potatoes, more noodles... A most satisfying meal, one you would especially want to have before you go cherry picking.
The cherry orchards were muddy and long and big. The best cherries were up at the top of the tree, where none of us could reach but that was jolly well with me. The pretty bright red ones were near the bottom. :D Granted, these probably weren't completely ripe, but they would be eventually.
I have provided some pictures to help me better explain the day.
For one, note that sky. Look at the clouds. Is that not beautiful? Is that not clearly perfect to you? And up in that tree that no one can reach are cherries, you might be able to see them better if you enlarge the picture. Ripe cherries. It's like they're laughing and saying among themselves, "They can't get us, the short humans can't get us! Hooray!"
Now here are reachable cherries. See how red they are? Aren't they prettier when they're red? Whoever took this picture, I like the patch of sky seen at the back. It's like one of those adventure stories where the hero/heroine have trekked through the wild, dangerous forest for weeks and finally see civilization through the trees.... only, not as dramatic. :/
This is a berry that Emma found. Two merged together into one. If you turn it ninety degrees, you could make a mini snowman. :)
Who can go a post without mentioning Matthew just once? (I can't, although Baba can)
He would settle to happily pick berries for about two minutes, then they would lose his interest and he would resort to running up and down all the cherry fields while some tagged behind him. Eventually, he would return to the cherries, but only for two minutes, before going off again...
This is one of those cherry-picking-for-two-minutes moments.
And after a fine day's work we set off to pay for the cherries by the kilo. I'm not sure how much that would be because I still have not mastered the metric system.
(Did you know only three counties don't use the metric system? America, of course, Liberia, and Myanmar.)
Emma has some videos of the cherry-picking experience, but they take ages to load, so they'll come in another post.
Maybe.
~Abby
P.S. I meant to post this much earlier, but I decided not to... for some reason...