Picnic in the Park

Yesterday was almost a perfect day. May in Qingdao should have its own little category somewhere in the realm of Goodness. It is a beautiful time of year. It seemed especially beautiful because we spent nearly all of it outside, and we didn't do anything that we should or ought to be doing right now.

We have only three weeks left here in our home and we have been feeling a little bit of the crunch. This time of year is an especially busy one even without that fact. When your husband works at a school and you live in a community of expatriates who travel to all parts of the world or are uprooting to other parts of the world at the close of the spring term, it generates a lot of frantic- and often dramatic- activity. There are goodbye parties nearly every day (on the hour?), there are wrap up events at school nearly every evening, there are final exams, there is packing, there are sales and stuff-giveaways flooding your inbox. And then there is normal life like dinner and groceries and laundry. 

But yesterday we just spent the day together, on the first full Saturday that felt like Summer was saying hello and giving us a kiss on our pale, pasty cheeks. We took a long bike ride, all five of us, in the morning. We sat around outside and raised seats, patched tires, and hunted for tools picked up by little hands. We ate dinner in a park just up the hill from our home- a park I've haunted for the four years we've lived here and used for so many outlets: picnics, hunting expeditions, photo shoots, evening walks, and I think half the pictures in my [month of mornings] photo challenge.

The light was so beautiful. I can get almost twitchy at this time of day and usually need to tell myself to put my camera down. The sunflare and glowy atmosphere are addicting.

The Man has a week long trip in Hong Kong with his students (he left this morning) so we were happy to get in as many bike rides and hugs and soccer games (my needs were a little different) as we could before he left.

I will miss this park. It's been a sweet little place for us and is full of quirks that make it in particular, a park in China: the Saturday morning choir with accordion, the morning Tai Chi gatherings, the dog poop, the kite flying, the grandmas with their toddling charges- and then us, the foreigner and her kids running around with sticks and shooting at imaginary jedi warriors.