What's that you say?
On Saturday morning I found we had three teenage girls spending the night with Cici. A fourth had arrived after I went to bed Friday night. I went to the office to meet with a client while the girls slept. When I came back early afternoon they were up and ready to go to the nearby shopping mall. Now you might thing the girls would insist that Ping take them shopping, but they were perfectly happy to have me take them.
You can learn a lot when you are driving two Chinese and two Korean teenagers around, I found. With English as the common language, I could hear all of their conversation. This is the first time I have been with Cici in this kind of setting, and I learned new things about her. Two of the other girls are age 18, and one is age 19. Cici is still age 15, but one would probably not notice or suspect the age difference.
It is amazing how quickly these girls pick up each other's native language. They also worked in a smattering of Japanese and Vietnamese as they talked, as well as Spanish. That encouraged me about the prospects of Cici learning Spanish.
I turned the girls loose inside the mall. They said they just wanted two hours so I stayed and enjoyed a Starbucks coffee and a shoulder massage from one of the Chinese men who have chair massage facilities set up in the middle of one of the corridors. These men know me now because Ping and I have stopped there previously.
Right on schedule two hours later, Cici called me and asked me to meet them at Victoria's Secret. Ping had asked her to select some bottles of something to take to China as gifts. Why does Cici have two groups of seven bottles, I wondered until they rang them up. The price was $8.99 for each bottle unless you purchased seven bottles, at which time the price dropped to $4.00 for each of the seven bottles. So instead of paying $126.00 we paid $56.00.
That was the transaction that Cici and I took care of. The older girls were busy looking at secrets.
At their request I put Phantom of the Opera in for the girls to watch when we got back home, but told them we would need to interrupt the movie to watch the Preakness Stakes. Ping joined the girls to watch the movie. None of them cared about the horserace - until I set the stage. There is a female horse running in this race, I told them. Only one. A female horse has not won this race in 85 years. Do you think she can win today?
Rachel Alexandra suddenly had an Asian cheering section. The girls cheered her wildly and celebrated her victory with a lot of enthusiasm, in multiple languages. I used a different language to gain their interest: Suspense
You can learn a lot when you are driving two Chinese and two Korean teenagers around, I found. With English as the common language, I could hear all of their conversation. This is the first time I have been with Cici in this kind of setting, and I learned new things about her. Two of the other girls are age 18, and one is age 19. Cici is still age 15, but one would probably not notice or suspect the age difference.
It is amazing how quickly these girls pick up each other's native language. They also worked in a smattering of Japanese and Vietnamese as they talked, as well as Spanish. That encouraged me about the prospects of Cici learning Spanish.
I turned the girls loose inside the mall. They said they just wanted two hours so I stayed and enjoyed a Starbucks coffee and a shoulder massage from one of the Chinese men who have chair massage facilities set up in the middle of one of the corridors. These men know me now because Ping and I have stopped there previously.
Right on schedule two hours later, Cici called me and asked me to meet them at Victoria's Secret. Ping had asked her to select some bottles of something to take to China as gifts. Why does Cici have two groups of seven bottles, I wondered until they rang them up. The price was $8.99 for each bottle unless you purchased seven bottles, at which time the price dropped to $4.00 for each of the seven bottles. So instead of paying $126.00 we paid $56.00.
That was the transaction that Cici and I took care of. The older girls were busy looking at secrets.
At their request I put Phantom of the Opera in for the girls to watch when we got back home, but told them we would need to interrupt the movie to watch the Preakness Stakes. Ping joined the girls to watch the movie. None of them cared about the horserace - until I set the stage. There is a female horse running in this race, I told them. Only one. A female horse has not won this race in 85 years. Do you think she can win today?
Rachel Alexandra suddenly had an Asian cheering section. The girls cheered her wildly and celebrated her victory with a lot of enthusiasm, in multiple languages. I used a different language to gain their interest: Suspense
Something tells me that wasn't Lon Chaney's Phantom!
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