Rubik's cube

The Rubik's Cube is in fashion at the moment.

While we were away in China the cousins got into it, so when we got back at the end of July Mulan and Miya immediately tried it, too.

At first they were using my old classic early-80s cube, which I got when I was their age.  But those ones are incredibly stiff and slow, so when Miya had her birthday a few weeks later we gave her a new, modern speed cube.

The girls have been regularly working on it over the past few months.  Mulan has been able to complete it for a while now, and her fastest time has been steadily dropping.  Today, she got a new best time of 1 minute 37 seconds.

Miya has been slower to memorise the algorithms, but yesterday she proudly announced to me that she can now complete it, too.

And would you believe it, but Miya did it in 1 minute 14 seconds today!  Apparently it was a very lucky scramble, as she had far fewer algorithms to do on the final layer.

UPDATE: Mulan just fact-checked this.  She informs me that Miya's other times today were over 2 minutes.  But lucky scrambles still count as records, so Miya has the house record for now!  Two of the cousins can do it in under 1 minute.

My birthday pressie

I got a lovely birthday pressie from Miya this week.

For some days previously she'd been secretly doing something on the computer.  It turns out she'd been writing stories -- five four of them -- and then she printed them off for me.  So, I got a seven-page book of original short stories.

Beautiful!

UPDATE: Oops, Mulan just told me that she wrote the fifth story (and she also spell-checked it all).

Sign language

One thing I forgot to include in our Term 4 plans was that we are doing a New Zealand Sign Language course.

This is something new for us, although in the past Mulan and Miya have both, unschool style, played with signing and kinda learnt the alphabet.

The course, run through HASCA, is only four one-hour lessons over four weeks.  Quite clearly it is intended merely as a quick introduction.  I haven't heard if they are going to continue it more seriously afterwards, but it would be awesome if they did.

Well, we had our first lesson on Friday.  I counted 19 kids in the class, ranging from five to maybe about 15.  Most kids were around eight to ten, I guess.  At first it was said that us parents couldn't go in, and I was just saying goodbye to the girls when it seems there was a change of plans and we were invited to stay.  Awesome -- I think it is important that we know what is going on in the classroom so we can help the kids outside of the classroom.

The teacher is deaf and spoke to the class entirely in Sign Language.  She also had an interpreter speaking in English for us as she signed.  This, in itself, was a great experience for the kids.  And I think this alone made the lessons worthwhile.  The interpreter stood at the back, and it was emphasised that the kids look at the teacher and speak directly to her, not the interpreter.

In practice, the lesson really was a quick introduction to the idea of Sign Language.  It was not a proper first lesson to a new foreign/second language.

Over the course of one hour, the teacher presented about 50 signs.  This was the alphabet (a sign for each letter a to z), the numbers 0 to 10, and several greetings signs so that the kids could say hello, ask a person's name, say their own name, say happy to meet you, and say I don't know or don't understand.  That is a lot!

Obviously, it was done very fast.  And in a class of 19 students the teacher was unable to individually check the kids were getting it right.  I noticed many kids were mirroring the teacher rather than doing the correct hands, and many were struggling to hold their hands correctly.  Almost all went uncorrected.

I think I am right to say that neither Mulan nor Miya got any individual attention from the teacher for the entire lesson.  However she did pick out a couple of students who she helped several times -- both the youngest and the oldest children.

Nonetheless the teacher was confident and organised in the lesson.  She alternated smoothly between presenting the language and organising activities for language practice.  It looks like she has taught this many times before.

But realistically, it was too much, too quickly, and with too many students for it to count as a genuine foreign/second language lesson.  As I say, it was a fun taste, and a well done fun taste.  However, if it was to continue more long term I would expect it to be structured very differently.

Sydney

Schools had their holidays a few weeks ago, so a lot of our classes had stopped.  It was a good time for us to hop across to Sydney, Australia and have a bit of a look around.

I have no idea if this counts as a holiday for us or an educational class trip.  It certainly wasn't relaxing.  But it was lots of fun, and we did learn a few things.

For me it was also partly a "back-to".  I’d lived in Sydney for a year in 1980, and had often visited as a child, but I hadn’t been back for 25 years.  For Mama, Mulan and Miya it was their first time in Australia.

Day 1 (Sunday 30 September 2018): Arriving in Sydney

We missed the bus!

We'd prepaid for the airport shuttle bus, from home to Auckland Airport, and we missed it.  I blame Mama; she blames me.  But the end result was that we had to phone Gugu and ask her to drive us to the airport.

This was all around 5:15 in the morning.  Our flight was supposed to leave at 8:15 am.  And it was the morning that daylight savings started, so we had lost an hour overnight and were still kinda tired.

Luckily Gugu was awake, and she was able to get us to the airport in time.

We had booked the cheapest flight, which was with Jetstar, and you get what you pay for.  We had to pay extra for any check-in luggage, and we opted to check in one 15 kg bag.  No food was provided during the flight, so we brought our own home-made sammies.

And then the flight was delayed one and a half hours after we boarded.  The pilot was informative, letting us know what was happening.  Firstly, they had to reset the computers — the paperwork for which seemed to take longer than fixing the problem itself.  Then a passenger at the terminal reported that a door was open on our plane.  Better to be safe than sorry, and they called out the engineers to re-check the plane.  It turned out that the door was supposed to be open (air-con, I think they said).

Sydney still hadn’t started daylight savings, and our 10 am Sydney-time arrival was three hours behind New Zealand.  Mama’s friend, Kane, picked us up from the airport and drove us to our home, which was a new apartment Kane’s friend had recently bought out west in Toongabbie.

Our home was like a very scaled-down version of our Chengdu apartment.  Like Chengdu, we were in an apartment complex with shops underneath, an open area (with swimming pool and tennis court) above the shops, and a few apartment buildings sprouting up from the open area.  The train station was also just a few minutes’ walk away.  The big difference was that the Toongabbie building was somewhat smaller — the top floor was only level 6, and the open area was one floor above the ground.  We were also on the first floor.

(The view from our balcony of Toongabbie, with the train station in the distance.)

After lunch we visited Kane's home, which was just a few minutes away over the train tracks.  Kane and family have planted a beautiful garden, making their home look the nicest in his street.  Walking home again, and wandering around the local area, we stopped off at a couple of playgrounds.  Toongabbie seems a bit run down — there is graffiti everywhere, and a sign at the big playground warned people of syringes.  One morning when we came out of our apartment the lift smelt of vomit.

Day 2: Opera House and Botanic Garden

Sydney gets light very early at this time of year, and we woke with the sunlight soon after 5 am.

We caught the train into the city centre, transferring at Central and arriving at Circular Quay.  We hugely enjoyed the train announcers’ personalities.  Mostly transport announcers sound like, well, transport announcers.  But we got some fun ones here — one man was very laid back, while one woman was ultra-perky.  One announcer pronounced Quay as “kwee,” and we started to doubt ourselves and think that that was the proper local pronunciation.  But in later trips the announcers all said “kee.”

The local Sydney city trains are convenient, though confusing.  Unlike other cities where the trains run repeatedly on the same set lines, Sydney city trains are a bit like intercity trains in that different lines run at different times.  Trips need more advanced planning, as not all trains stop at the smaller stations.  Mama was in charge of planning, using the online planner on her phone, and often we were running for the train in the mornings.

The girls soon got into a habit on the trains of playing a train station memory game.  They took it in turns to name a station, and by the end of our holiday I think they had both memorised almost every train station in Sydney.

Mama had read that the view from Circular Quay train station is the best of any train station in the world.  I’d believe that; I can’t think of any other train station with such a stunning view.

From Circular Quay we walked towards the Sydney Opera House, following the “Writers Walk” — circles placed periodically in the footpath describing various Australian-influenced writers.  I didn’t recognise many of the local writers, though there were several big-name international writers who had visited Sydney some 100 or so years ago and then incorporated their experiences into their novels.

Mama's immediate reaction to the Opera House was that she thought it looked smaller in real life.  We walked a circuit around the Opera House, also noting that up close it looked a bit rough and unfinished.  But of course it is still an incredibly stunning building, especially when viewed from further away.

We ate on the grassy area overlooking the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.  What an amazing view, and there was almost no one around!  We saw our first wild cockatoo (with a number on its wing) perched in a tree.  We saw plenty more later.

The grassy area was the start of the Royal Botanic Garden, and after eating we continued walking through the Garden, alongside the water, to Mrs Macquaries Point.  Along the way the girls found and climbed an excellent tree (one of the best they have ever climbed, they said).  We saw several ibises wandering around the Garden (again, the first of many).

It was a bit more exposed and windier at the Point than it had been elsewhere in the Garden.  But the girls finally got a chance to dabble their feet in the water, as the rock seawall ended and we were able to walk over rocks and into the water.

At the Point, we looked back across the bay towards the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.  Looking in the other direction we could see a naval base, where a large ship was tied up.

Mrs Macquaries Chair, at the Point, was a natural-looking section of the cliff where it appeared that the lower part had been carved out by water, leaving an overhang.  One could sit on the rocky chair and be protected from the rain by the overhang.

Turning around, we wandered back through the Garden, but this time along different paths and further away from the waterfront.  Arriving back at Circular Quay around 3 pm we caught the train home.

Mama wasn't having a complete holiday from work, and she needed to go to Kane's house to do some online stuff in the evening.  She did this a few other evenings, too.

Day 3: Manly

This was my big back-to day, as we visited my old home area.

We’d heard that the trains are cheaper after 9 am, so we left home just after that time, again getting off at Circular Quay.  From there, we caught the 10:30 am ferry to Manly, which took about 30 minutes.

While standing outside the ferry building, we were given a couple of information booklets by a red-shirted tourism volunteer.  One of the booklets informed us that Manly is called Manly because when Arthur Philip arrived in 1788 he thought the local Kay-ye-my Aboriginal people looked very manly.

Until I read that, it had never even crossed my mind that Manly was anything more than just a place name.  And now I'll never see it in the same way again.  It's like how when Mama first arrived in New Zealand she laughed at our big department store chain, Farmers.  It had also never occurred to me before; Farmers is just like a big advertisement saying that New Zealanders are countryside folk!

From the Manly Wharf we walked the short distance along “The Corso,” the pedestrian street, to the beach.  Hungry already, we ate sitting on Manly beach.  This early in the summer, the wind was still a little icy, but the sun was warm and the sky was blue and there were plenty of sunbathers about.  Mulan and Miya were curious to see that all the women wore bikinis.  In China they are used to women wearing one-pieces with frills.  In New Zealand they don’t wear the frills, but they still usually wear the one-pieces.

Heading north along the beach we soon found one of my old back-to sites, the “Trident” building.  I had stayed there during a two-week holiday back in 1982.  Conveniently there was a playground just in front of it, where the girls played for a while.

At the north end of Manly Beach we felt the water of the Rockpool.  A couple of swimmers went in and out quickly, but the water was pretty icy for sustained swimming.  We walked up the cliff and over to Freshwater Beach.  A large lizard (maybe 30 cm or so) was wandering across the path as we walked down.  The girls played in another playground at the beach, just in front of Nainai and Yeye’s old house they had lived in about 50 years ago.

From Freshwater Beach we walked up to the Harbord shops.  Harbord was my home suburb in 1980, and I think I recognised some areas.  We passed through Jacka Park, where we stopped at the playground for a short time.  This was where magpies used to swoop down on us back in the day, but none were there this time.

Then it was on to 16 Wyadra Ave, my old home.  And it still looks the same!  From there, we walked past Gugu’s old school, Harbord Public School, then past my old kindergarten, before arriving at Curl Curl Beach.

After (impatiently) waiting all day, the girls finally got to have a swim at the Curl Curl Rockpool.  It was icy cold, but the three of us all managed to swim for a bit.  Mama had conveniently failed to bring her togs to Australia.

As the sun got lower the air got colder, and shivering a little we caught the 4:30 pm bus to Warringah Mall (another old memory), where we caught another bus over the Harbour Bridge to Wynyard.  From there, we caught the train back home.

We had dinner with Kane's family in the evening.  My face and shoulders were pink with sunburn.

Day 4: Harbour Bridge, Wendy's Garden, Luna Park

Yet again, in the morning we caught the train to Circular Quay.  But this time we turned left from the train station towards the Harbour Bridge.

We walked the other half of the Writers Walk, again reading about the local writers, before going through The Rocks and taking the stairs up and onto the Harbour Bridge.  We could feel the bridge swaying slightly with the movement of the cars and trains as we walked the length to the northern side.  The view was beautiful from the middle, and it was another pleasant day (though slightly more overcast).

Off the bridge at the other side, we continued north before turning into Lavender Street where we then walked down and into Wendy Whiteley’s Secret Garden.  Apparently, some 20 or so years ago it was just a scrubby public-land hillside.  Needing something to distract her after the death of her husband, Wendy, who knew nothing about gardening but was an artist, started working on the hillside.  What she has created is amazingly beautiful and unique.  It is a definite must-see when in Sydney.  After wandering back and forth along the paths, we sat and simply relaxed for quite a while in the garden.  While sitting, we heard some spooky laughter and a couple of kookaburras landed in the tree above us.

From Wendy’s Garden we walked the short distance to Luna Park, which, while uniquely artistic in its own way, is kinda the opposite in feel to Wendy’s Garden.  For those who don’t know, Luna Park is the famous old-style carnival amusement park, which first opened in the 1930s.  We walked through the park, stopping periodically to watch the rides.

From Luna Park it was a short walk to Milsons Point train station, where we took a direct train back home.  Our train went over the Harbour Bridge, so we had walked, bussed and trained over the bridge.

Day 5: Rest day

We needed a rest day after the long days of sightseeing, and the weather said so too.  Overnight it started raining, and it drizzled for most of the day.  Our best weather was over, and most of the remaining days were cloudy or rainy.

The girls and I stayed at home all day.  The girls swam twice in the apartment complex pool, while I swam once (in the rain).  The water was cool, but not icy like the Rockpools on Tuesday.  Mama went out in the afternoon with Kane.

Day 6: Australian Museum

A wet day meant an indoor museum day.

We thought the Australian Museum looked the most interesting, so we caught the train to the Museum station and, huddling under umbrellas, walked the short distance across Hyde Park.  There was a bit of a queue outside the museum entrance, and we had to stand under our umbrellas for another several minutes before we got under cover.

We were inside the museum for about six hours in total.  While there was still more that we could have seen, we’d all had enough museum-ing by the end of the day.

We (that is, Mama and I) especially wanted to focus on the local Australian exhibits, so first up we went to the “First Australians” section.  As a child, I had known nothing about the atrocities done to the Aboriginal people by the whitey immigrants.  It was never part of our schooling, and even living in Australia didn’t educate me about this — our Aussie cultural studies schooling consisted mostly of learning a few “Dreamtime” myths.  It has only been in the last few years that I heard about the “Stolen Generations,” and started to realise just how awful the immigrants often were.

At the Museum I learnt a few more shocking facts.  I had known nothing about the apartheid system in place in Australia in the 1960s, nor the 1965 “Freedom Ride” protests which helped start the process towards more equality.  The Australian Museum was thus an excellent eye-opener for me, as we watched the videos and read the displays telling the personal stories of the people involved.

Next we moved into the section that showed various Aboriginal artefacts.  For a culture that is some 40,000 to 60,000 years old, there is surprisingly little remaining.

The girls (Miya especially) were more interested in the animal displays (and were kinda bored with the people stuff).  So, we wandered around the displays that showed the extinct megafauna, kangaroos, etc, before heading into the bird section.  The girls were interested in identifying the various birds that we had seen locally.

Finally, we visited the “top 100 Australians” and “top 100 artefacts” sections.  The former was an opinionated view of influential local people; the latter was the museum’s star artefacts, with a focus on the Pacific area.

Day 7: Blue Mountains

We travelled the furthest this day, all the way to the Blue Mountains.  It was a couple of hours on the train further out west to Katoomba.  The weather was pleasant where we were, though we heard that in Sydney it was rainy.

While there we learnt that the Blue Mountains are blue because of the eucalyptus trees which dominate the forests.  Apparently, eucalyptus oil evaporates into the air from the leaves.  Light refracts through the oil vapour, where it is bent towards the blue end of the spectrum.  What I had initially thought to be smog was actually the slightly bluer light.

At Katoomba train station we caught the local bus to Scenic World, where we bought an all-day pass to the park.  This park combines beautiful mountain scenery and bush walks with historic preservation and stunning rides.

The entrance to the park is at the top of a cliff overlooking a tree-filled valley.  Walks along the top provided stunning scenery of the cliffs and valley below, while walks down below were pleasantly peaceful through the bush.

The historic aspect was the coal mine in the valley.  We saw the entrance to the mine, a miner’s hut and old equipment.

But most importantly, we saw the old train line that brought the coal up the cliff to the town above.  And the line was steep.  They have now turned it into a tourist ride, where it is the steepest passenger train in the world, at 52 degrees.

Our day pass entitled us to ride the railway as often as we wanted, so we rode it seven times.  There was also a cable car, the “Scenic Cableway,” down into the valley, which we rode three times.  And thirdly there was the “Scenic Skyway,” the highest cable car in Australia, which has a glass floor, strung across between cliff tops.  We rode that one twice.

We feel like we got our money’s worth.  We were at the park for about six hours and we caught the final railway up at the end of the day.

Day 8: Ferry, The Rocks, Darling Harbour

We got another daylight savings start, losing an hour overnight, so when we woke up Sydney was only two hours behind New Zealand.

Taking advantage of the cheaper public transport on Sundays, we got the train to Parramatta, where we caught the ferry to Circular Quay.

The ferry ride, which took about an hour, was lovely as we cruised down the Parramatta River.  The main problem was the occasional sharp shower, which combined with the breeze made things a bit chilly outside.  But we still chose to brave the weather — a little wetness was a small price to pay.

From Circular Quay we again turned left towards the Harbour Bridge, but this time we wandered around The Rocks, the old historic area where the new immigrants set up home and business a couple of hundred years ago.  It was fascinating to read about their lives, and see some of the artefacts and old buildings.

The showers continued throughout the day as we had a quick look up at Observatory Hill before catching a train to Central and the light rail to Darling Harbour.

We got off the light rail at Paddy’s Market, as this was another back-to for me.  Back in 1988 I was selected for an athletics team to compete in the Australian children’s national competition.  If I remember rightly, there were 22 of us 11-to-12-year-old Kiwi kids in the team.  When we weren’t competing we got to do a bit of sightseeing, and one of my distinct memories is being dropped off at Paddy’s Market by the adults and wandering around there freely with the rest of the kids, having been told to meet up with the adults again in a few hours.  Call me over-protective, but I don’t think I’d be happy with Mulan doing that now.

Mama wasn’t too impressed with Paddy’s Market, but I enjoyed the back-to.

From the Market we headed to the Harbour.  We took a photo of the girls standing in the sculpture-fountain, where I had stood 30 years ago.  We also had a ride on the Ferris wheel — the girls’ first time on a big one.

It was getting dark around 7 pm, and we watched the lights start to flick on around the harbour.  We caught a ferry from Pyrmont Bay Wharf under the Harbour Bridge to Circular Quay, enjoying seeing the lights on the Opera House and elsewhere.  It was still a little cold and wet, but we again braved the outside for the sake of the view.

From Circular Quay we caught the train home.

Day 9: Wedding Cake Rock

One of Mama’s old school friends now lives in Sydney, and for the catch-up with her it was decided that she would drive us to see the Wedding Cake Rock.

This Rock, which is just over an hour’s drive south, near Bundeena, is hanging off a wild coastal cliff top and looks, unsurprisingly, like a white wedding cake.

The walk from the car park to the Rock is 3.4 km.  Walking slowly out and enjoying the scenery took us a couple of hours, while walking back took us less than an hour.  Again the weather was mixed, and it showered a bit on and off, especially during the walk back.

The Rock, indeed, did look like a wedding cake.  Apparently, the mineral iron has been naturally bleached out of the sandstone rock, making it white.  This bleaching has also weakened the rock, and it has partly cracked away from the rest of the cliff.  A few years ago a geological assessment was made and they concluded that it was highly unstable and could fall at any time.  They fenced it off and put up plenty of warning signs, but we still saw several tourists squeeze through the fence to take their photos on the Rock.

Back in Sydney, Mama had dinner out with her friend, so they dropped the girls and me off at a train station and we caught the train home.

Day 10: Featherdale Wildlife Park

A pleasant day was forecast, and provided, so we went to the zoo.

The zoo of choice was Featherdale Wildlife Park, about 15 minutes drive from our home (Kane drove us there and picked us up).  We were there for about seven hours, and it was just the right amount of time to see everything, in a relaxed way.

Featherdale is a smaller zoo.  It doesn’t have the typical international animals, instead choosing to focus on local Australian ones.  With several of the significant animals, they do feeding/information events throughout the day, and these were definitely worth watching.  We saw in turn, pelicans, fairy penguins, echidna, crocodile, night bats, fruit bats, and dingoes (sadly, the Tasmanian devils weren’t on display).  As part of our entrance package we had our photo taken with a koala, which we were able to stroke.  We were also supplied with kangaroo food, which we handfed to the kangas that hopped freely around us in the enclosures.

When we got home the girls had a 50-minute swim in our apartment complex pool.  This made this and the Blue Mountains trip the girls' favourite days of the holiday.

Day 11: Berry Island Aboriginal rock carvings

A rainy day was forecast, and provided.  But we still wanted to get out and do something, so we decided to go to see the Aboriginal rock carvings at Berry Island.

We caught the train to Wollstonecraft, where we walked the short distance to the Island that isn’t an island.  Rather, back in the day it was a rocky hill connected to the mainland by a sandy bar that was about half a metre above high tide.  When the new immigrants arrived it seems that they had a habit of dragging their boats over the sand until it was eventually eroded away.  It turned into an island briefly before the sand was replaced with a stone walkway.  The connecting land is now a grassy park.

The Aboriginal carvings were faint and very difficult to pick out, but once again it was eye-opening to consider how quickly the culture was lost with the arrival of the settlers.  Smallpox killed many of the Aboriginal people, and with them died the stories that explained the significance of the carvings.  We have no idea of the meaning of the fish-like picture carved in the rock, and with no one from the clan left to re-mark the lines, the sandstone pictures are almost gone.

I write this calmly, but it was anything but calm while reading the information boards in the driving rain (and occasional thunder and lightning).  The 800 metre walk around the perimeter of the “island” was a wet and soggy event, and we were wondering who would win the “wettest clothes” competition (I think it was a four-way tie!).

Beaten by the weather, we arrived back home soon after midday.  The girls had another swim in the apartment pool later in the afternoon.

Day 12: Bondi

Our last day in Sydney, and we wanted to see the famous beach that is Bondi.  Unfortunately the weather still wasn't cooperating, but at least it was better than the day before.

We caught the train to Central, where we caught a connecting bus to Coogee Beach.  The plan was to then walk north following the path along the coast in and out of the bays and over the clifftops until we got to Bondi Beach.

The plan worked mostly well, with the main problem being the occasional shower.  The coastline is indeed stunning in its beautiful wildness, and the walk was enjoyable.  We went in and out past Gordons Bay, Clovelly Beach (which looks nothing like Clovelly in the UK), Nelson Bay and MacKenzies Bay before reaching Bondi Beach.

Overlooking Bondi, Mama said that she still preferred Auckland beaches.  Surprised, I agreed with her, thinking that she would say something about these Sydney beaches being not so good for swimming.  But no, Mama didn't like that Sydney beaches were lacking shady trees to sit under.  Sigh, sometimes Mama is so very Chinese!

From Bondi Beach we caught the bus to Bondi Junction, where we caught the train home.

Day 13 (Friday 12 October): Flight home

We had another early flight, though with departure set for 9:55 am it wasn't quite so painfully early this time.

But yet again our plane was delayed, and this time for three hours.  Our boarding gate changed a couple of times, before we eventually settled in to wait at Gate 26, apparently the gate for all the problematic delayed flights.  Nonetheless the time went by fairly smoothly, people-watching other flights steadily leaving.

When we got on the plane the electrics in the cabin weren't working -- lights, music and air-con were all dead.  The first replacement thingamee box didn't work, and so they needed to scrounge up another replacement.  I overheard one passenger wonder if it was too late to get off the plane -- he declared that he'd rather be late than die.

Eventually we took off, and we survived the flight.  But then there was another minor delay at Auckland Airport when they struggled to connect the plane up with the bridge at the terminal, and everyone was left squeezed into the aisles waiting to get off.

I have no idea if this was all merely several unfortunate coincidences, or whether Jetstar has issues.

Anyway, we caught our airport shuttle bus this time, and we arrived in home just as the sun was setting.  The girls immediately decided that they weren't yet ready to come home and they had a two-night sleepover with the cousins at Gugu's home.  Mama and I played at being Old Couple Alone With Cats for the weekend.

Term 4

We are now into the first week back in Term 4.

(Yup, even though we homeschool, we still have to follow the school term system.)

For most of the two-week holiday break we were over in Sydney, Australia.  It was my first time there in 25 years, while Mama and the girls had never been there.  I wrote a travel diary while we were away.  I'll probably post it here in the near future.

This term, our big focus (once again) is ballet.  The girls' ballet school will be doing a performance (Alice in Wonderland) in December, and they are learning dances for that.  Mulan is having 8 1/4 hours of lessons each week (four days a week), while Miya is having 4 1/2 hours of lessons (three days a week).  They often do ballet at home, too, including teaching the cousins.

As part of getting the girls more independent, last term we were often catching the bus to ballet rather than taking the car.  At first I went with them in the bus, but they are starting to go on their own now, too.  We bought a basic mobile phone for them to take while out and about.

The girls are still doing their music, though lessons don't start until next week.  Mulan is still learning flute, cello, recorder and ukulele.  Miya is still learning violin, recorder and ukulele.  They practice daily, alternating instruments.

Both Mulan and Miya still love the water, and are continuing with their swimming lessons.  In addition to lessons, we go to the public pools once a week for a fun/training session.

The girls are both still doing gymnastics once a week.

And finally, we have (sort-of) started athletics.  I say sort-of, because it clashes with ballet.  Both girls have chosen to prioritise their ballet, but they squeeze in a bit of athletics when they can.  Miya can attend the last half of Wednesday clubnight as well as some of the Monday coaching session.  Mulan may attend the occasional athletics evening when ballet is not on.

Oh, and our "schooling" stuff?  Yeah, that gets done quickly and easily, squeezed into our day:

For maths, both girls are still doing Khan Academy daily, and both are still about two years ahead of their ages.

Both girls are reading heaps -- both our own books and borrowed books from the library.

I continue to read aloud daily to the girls.  At the moment we are (unsurprisingly) reading Alice in Wonderland.

The girls still practice their typing daily.  Mulan gets up to 80 words per minute while Miya gets up to 60 words per minute.

We watch a YouTube video each day while eating lunch.  This varies depending on what jumps out at us.  Sometimes it is from Crash Course.  Sometimes it is ballet.

Both girls are still having Chinese lessons daily with Mama.  They have now joined Mama's Chinese teaching business as paid assistant teachers.  They work with the preschool students, doing Chinese language games and activities.

Our other subjects are typically done more "unschooling" style.

Book review: The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem (2006), by Cixin Liu, was required reading for me.

If it hadn't been for this fact, I may well have stopped reading it after the first chapter or two.  I wasn't impressed by the beginning, but since Teacher Mama required it, along with a suitably detailed book review analysis, I had to keep reading.

Mama had read it in the original Chinese, while I read Ken Liu's English translation, which was published in 2014.

For those who don't know, The Three-Body Problem is a science fiction novel set mostly in China and written from a Chinese perspective.  That's pretty special; most science fiction is US (or occasionally British) based.  And that matters, because science fiction is not merely about neutral, objective, geeky sciency stuff.  At heart, science fiction is, almost always, an investigation into, and an opinionated commentary on, societies and morality.  Even the more hard-science style of science fiction shows us the author's (admittedly sometimes un-thought-through) views on life and What Is Most Important.  In this sense, The Three-Body Problem gives us an interesting and thought-provoking Chinese eye view of people and society.

And it is a depressing and pessimistic view.  But more on that later.

Starting at the beginning, why was I not impressed with the first couple of chapters?

Partly it was because I felt that it was poorly written.  The first chapter, especially, was over-filled with amateurish, badly thought-through similes.  It was extremely off-putting, like a picture frame hung crookedly.  Or like a piece of food stuck in one’s teeth.

When I said this to Mama, she was very surprised, as she thought that the Chinese version was eloquently written.  Doubts were subsequently raised as to my authority and competence as an English language critic.

So, to get another opinion, we employed Mulan to read the first chapter.  Unprompted, she said much the same as me.  In fact, she laughed at the inappropriate similes, thinking them very silly.

Admittedly, this is not conclusive evidence.  Mulan's English sense, after all, has been significantly influenced by me.  But until we can convince anyone else to take a look at the book, we'll stick with this judgment.  Our best guess, then, is that it is a bad translation.  Perhaps Ken Liu tried to translate too much word for word, and what works in Chinese doesn't work in English.  Further into the book this became less of a problem, as the silly similes faded away.  The writing became more direct in style, and smoother to read.

The other part of why I was not impressed with the first couple of chapters turns out to be more difficult to explain.  In a couple of words, I could say "casual violence," but it is more complicated than that.  As I read further into the book I realised that what bothered me was linked to the key underlying social commentary given by the author.  The author was expressing a worldview, and encouraging the reader to believe in it, while I was fundamentally opposed to it.

I'll try to explain.  A bit of plot exposition may help.

The Three-Body Problem starts in 1967, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and continues into the present.  In Chapter 1 we open with some particularly nasty scenes of violence.  That's understandable.  It is a historical fact that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was a horrifically violent and nasty time.

But there are different ways of telling a story of this violence.  One way might be to create an empathetic feel with the victims, showing the struggles and hurts from their perspective, as real human beings who deserve, but failed to receive, care and respect.  Part of this more sensitive approach might be also to try to understand how society and individuals could have become so broken that the perpetrators lost the ability to feel for others as they enacted those atrocities.

Liu doesn't do any of this.  His writing reminded me, instead, of Iain M. Banks' book, Consider Phlebas, which I reviewed earlier this year.  Liu, like Banks, seems to focus on writing imaginative violence as graphically as possible.  And while I can't know what was going on inside these writers' heads, with both of them their writing gave me the feel of them enjoying putting together those flowing descriptions of violence.  The violence was not written as a tragedy; it was written as a fun exercise in language creation.

It was that offensive heartlessness in the opening chapters of The Three-Body Problem that made me feel it wasn't worth reading.  I am not interested in reading violence porn.  Moreover, novels are subtle influencers of readers' moral attitudes, and I am opposed to novels that work to deaden the hearts of their readers.

But as I continued reading, I think I began to understand the book better, while still fundamentally disagreeing with the values and attitudes it expressed.

A bit more plot exposition.

From Chapter 1, we follow a university graduate student in 1967, Ye Wenjie, who has just seen her father, a university professor, killed by a revolutionary mob.  Ye is soon sent to the countryside, where she is forced to work cutting down trees.  Based on her background as a student in astrophysics, Ye is next forcefully transferred to a radar base, where she works her way up into a position of trust and authority.

This radar base turns out to be more than meets the eye, and while working there Ye develops a way of sending a super-strong message across the galaxy.  Thinking the experiment a failure, nothing further happens for another several years, until Ye, still working at the base, receives a message in reply from an alien civilisation.

Conveniently, Ye uses the base's deciphering software to instantly translate the alien message.  The message is a warning, advising Earth not to reply further.  If Earth replies then a warlike alien race, the Trisolarans, will be able to locate Earth and invade.

Ye chooses to reply, sending the message "Come here!  I will help you conquer this world.  Our civilisation is no longer capable of solving its own problems.  We need your force to intervene."  (Chapter 23)

This quite clearly opens up key social and moral questions.  Ye is a product of a broken social environment.  She interprets this brokenness as the universal human condition, and thinks outside, non-human, intervention is the only solution.  (This is not a new idea; Christianity, with its idea of Original Sin, and Jesus as the Way, has the same thought.)

It seems to me that a scaled-down version of this thought is common in today's Chinese thinking.  I think a common Chinese thought is that life is necessarily tough, and we must be tough to survive.  This is presented as a cynical realism, and those who doubt it are seen as idealistic, naive, and not in touch with reality.  I've commented on this before, and as I've said before, I think this common Chinese thought is largely self-fulfilling -- since most Chinese people believe it, they act to make it true for themselves.  In reality, they don't have to be like that, but sadly they don't realise they don't have to be like that.

I felt that in this book Liu was writing from this perspective, and his heroic characters embodied this cynicism, and often with a certain arrogance.  Liu's heroic characters were typically scientists, engineers or police/military personnel.  They were knowledgeable and authoritative in their fields, and Liu (himself an ex power-plant engineer) was competent at explaining the technical scientific stuff.  But the problem was that the characters (and perhaps Liu, himself) thought that they could transfer this knowledge in the hard sciences across to the social sciences, and it didn't work.  The characters (and Liu's) pronouncements on social matters came across as naive and ignorant, but as they gave this with the same sense of authority as when they explained scientific matters they also came across as unpleasantly arrogant.

Alongside Ye Wenjie, from Chapter 4 we also follow another scientist, Wang Miao, in the present.  Wang represents the reader -- the typical educated, modern, upper-middle-class Chinese man with a science/engineering background.  Wang has a wife (who is a doctor) and a son (six years old), and while he uses them to help him in his research, he never thinks to genuinely interact with them as people.  Wang is dragged into a mystery, which seemingly challenges his normal understanding of science and scientific laws.

One part of this mystery is that physicists have been committing suicide.  Their suicide notes all claim that the evidence shows that "physics does not exist" and they had no choice.  Wow, strong stuff!

Wang learns that experiments around the world using high-energy particle accelerators have been coming back with inconsistent results.  When particles are collided, seemingly identical conditions yield different results.

Unfortunately, this is where The Three-Body Problem became like a silly horror story.  I hate horror stories.  They are unbearably frustrating because they turn everything into a big panic, whether or not panic is warranted.  Everyone runs around like headless chickens for no good reason.

Liu made his physicists run around like silly headless chooks.  The results of these experiments as described don't lead us to conclude that physics does not exist.  And they certainly ought not push anyone to suicide.

Liu's physicist characters, if they were reasonable, could have come to at least two other more plausible interpretations: (a) Universal physical laws still hold at a deeper level, but there is some other variable that is causing the inconsistent results (spoiler alert: this is what it was -- aliens!), or (b) physical laws still hold to some extent, but there are limitations and randomness, too.  A possible next step research project might have been to perform more nuanced experiments to see if they can detect any patterns in the particle-collision results.

Continuing on in the story, Wang is introduced to a virtual reality online computer game, called Three Body, which takes him into a mysterious world in which there are seemingly random periods of extremes of heat or cold.  Wang and the other game participants have to try to figure out how to predict these Chaotic Eras, so that game civilisation doesn't die out every time a chaotic period happens.

Given the title of the book and this computer game, it should come as no surprise that it turns out that this game world circles three suns, and is consequently sometimes closer and sometimes further away from the suns.

Unsurprisingly, too, it turns out that the invading aliens, the Trisolarans, come from such a planet.  They have given up on trying to accurately calculate the movement of their planet, and with their superior technology launch an invading force towards Earth.

The small number of humans who are aware of this situation form various political factions, with some wanting the aliens to come and conquer Earth (either to destroy or improve Earth) while others want to fight the aliens.  The  leaders of these factions seem pretty broken and crazy.  They don't do reasonable discussions; they just do pseudo-rationalistic justifications of extremism.

Lots of Earthly conflict and violence ensues between these various factions while waiting for the alien arrival, and we and Wang steadily learn the details of the situation.

The Three-Body Problem is the first in a trilogy of books, followed by The Dark Forest and Death's End.  Given the graphic violence, and the universally unpleasant, irrational, arrogant characters, I don't feel inclined to read the other two books.  For me, the book's main redeeming feature is that it is an interesting study into Chinese thinking about society.  But other than that I see it as mostly empty, sensationalist violence porn.

Ballet exams over

Term 3 is always the ballet exam season, with extra classes and lots of preparations.

We had the last of our ballet exams yesterday, when Miya sat her Grade 2 exam in the morning and Mulan sat her Grade 5 exam in the afternoon.

Earlier this month, Mulan sat her Contemporary dance exam.

Both girls love doing the exams, and there is always lots of excitement in the lead-up.

We haven't yet got the results from yesterday's grade exams, but both girls seemed very happy with their performances.  Mulan got Honours for her Contemporary exam.

With exams out of the way, we are now switching to thinking about the end of year show, which will be mid-December.  This year they are doing Alice in Wonderland.

So, of course I am now reading aloud the Alice in Wonderland (and then Through the Looking-Glass) book.  I'm sure I read Alice to Mulan some years ago when we were living in China, but it doesn't hurt to re-read it -- there is always so much there to think about.

No doubt we will also watch some YouTube videos of Alice in Wonderland ballets.

We also plan to get Mulan fitted for her first pointe shoes very soon, for her to start learning to dance in them in Term 4.