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China, September 2005 Day 10 This particular morning we got up and left the house at 6:15 a.m. and took a taxi to a large park. The park is packed and busy with thousands of people doing group exercises, no fees, just join in. People were jogging, walking, doing calisthenics, tai-chi, kung fu, kung fu with swords or fans, fan dancing (not the burlesque kind), ball room dancing, tap dancing, aerobics, on the monkey bars and on the public exercise equipment. The funniest thing we saw was an old man exercising by pushing his wheelchair about. When we'd seen just about everything and the noise and heat became too much, we took a long hot walk to the nearest Metro, rewarded ourselves with a Suntory Litchi flavored "Gatorade" and a coffee float and went back to the apartment. Poobie had started to feel a little stomach cramping and some body aches, so once we got back at around 10:30 a.m., he tried to take a nap. We also drank a quart of yogurt to put his system back in line. When lunchtime rolled around, my mom made noodles and Poobie went to the Cafe Tima Harbor and got himself a club sandwich on wheat bread. I got myself a slice of cheesecake. In the late afternoon, the sky fell down. It got almost as dark as night and then the lightning started in the distance. We were so high up in the apartment (30th floor) that it seemed as if the lightning was cracking right before our eyes. For a while, Bean took a chair out to the balcony to observe the storm, but then the winds got too high and I called him inside. Then he decided to go down to street level and observe. We went downstairs to watch buckets and buckets of water rain down. Poobie even went out to the street and got soaked. That night we ate dinner across the street from our apartment at a fancy restaurant. We were not dressed exactly right, but they gave us a table anyway and my mom finally got to eat the fancy little Shanghai snacks that she had craved the entire time. Casey said that dinner was the only one we went to where we weren't hot and sticky before we arrived.
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