aadler | Sixteenth day in China [October 16]

Susan claims I snore. (I won’t swear she’s wrong, because years ago I once woke myself by snoring too loud … but she’s more than once told me to stop snoring when I wasn’t even asleep, so credibility suffers a bit there.) She also claims I’m the only person she’s ever seen — and, as a professional nurse who’s done many night shifts over the last few decades, she’s seen a lot — who could snore while sleeping on his side. As a result, for the last several days (most of the last week, in fact, and some of the one before), one or the other of us has been sleeping on Kevin’s living room couch.

Last night it was me. When Susan got up this morning, I relocated to the bedroom and slept for a bit longer. When I got up, she was asleep on the couch. When Mei-li texted to let us know that they’d be a bit late picking us up this morning, the text woke her.

No problem, there was enough time for us to get ready, and even get a little to eat. Mei-li and Logan arrived … some time, I forget exactly when, and he drove the three of us to the Shenzhen Zoo, in which Susan had expressed some interest. The trip was long enough, due to unusually heavy traffic, that I dozed some during it. Once at the zoo, Logan dropped us off and Mei-li started the process of showing us around.

Straight in the gate, she rented a buggy for us, and the driver took us around the perimeter, pointing things out (Mei-li translated) and stopping whenever we liked. Susan got photos of herself feeding a giraffe, sitting on a Bactrian camel — the shaggy, two-humped kind — and with a parrot on her shoulder. After the buggy ride, we began exploring more areas on foot. There were a lot of school classes at the zoo today, and many of them seemed as excited at seeing Americans as at the animals (maybe because we were roaming around loose). Susan got to see live pandas for only the second time in her life (the first being when she went to the Washington D.C. zoo 1981, when Hsing-hsing and Ling-ling were still there), and turned down a chance to get inside a wire-wrapped truck and go into the tiger enclosure. We saw white peacocks and black swans — Shenzhen has the biggest swan lake in China — and kangaroos and monkeys/lemurs of various types. Mei-li bought us lunch at a little place not too far from the gates, and afterward we went to see the seal-and-dolphin show at the zoo’s little sea-park.

(Cultural note: I’d seen, the day at the beach, that a lot of Chinese use umbrellas as parasols on sunny days, whereas Americans seldom use the same utensil for both purposes. Mei-li had brought one … but it really was good only to shelter her and Susan, not enough for all three of us, and I pretty much baked during the dolphin show, and may even wind up with a mild sunburn.)

We took a cab back to the Yins’ home, where Susan and I promptly lay down to nap. She got up a bit before I did, but only a bit, and then she wound up lying down again to try and forestall a migraine. Dinner kept being delayed while we waited for Kevin to finish work and get home, but eventually we ate without him, and then we had Laura and Mei-li take us back to ‘our’ apartment.

Kevin will be working even more tomorrow, so we agreed in advance that Susan and I would just take the day for ourselves, maybe do a little local exploring and maybe a little by subway. Susan and I spent a while decompressing from the day, then I went on to bed just after 10:30 PM.