Getting sick of the wet weather yet? I bet you are! But don’t worry – after all this rain is done Shanghai will turn into a terribly hot desert of sun and unbearable humidity. Gotta love summer!
My first summer in China was spent exclusively in Shanghai - mostly because I was 8 months pregnant and they wouldn't let me fly anymore. At first I thought it would be awesome, I mean, I’ve been to Mexico and Cuba tons of times, I can take the heat… but no. No, Shanghai to me was a whole other beast. In fact, there was one day where I physically made my own swimming pool… out of sweat. Out of my own sweat. Before 11 in the morning. I was so hot, so hot, and pregnant, and sweaty.
So when I get that way the thing I like to do the most is swim. Funnily enough I have a slight phobia of public swimming pools. I’m good if I have enough distractions, like when I take Oren to baby swimming and figure if I spend too much time thinking about what may be in the water that chances are I’ll forget all about him and he’ll end up at the bottom of the pool - so I have pretty good incentive to focus. But, if left to my own thoughts, suddenly the fun summer experience of being in a pool turns into my brain screaming with thoughts of: “What is that guy doing? Did he just spit into the pool drain? Doesn’t that thing just drain back into the pool!? Is that baby not wearing a diaper at all? OMG is that a hair on my arm!? IS THAT A HAIR ON MY ARM!? WHOSE HAIR IS IT!?!?”
So sufficed to say it isn't enjoyable to me. It all stems from when I used to work in promotions and had to be at this water park a few weekends in a row. On break time my coworker and I would take a trip down the lazy river on our inner tubes and talk about how giving out stickers and standing around aimlessly was pretty much the best summer job ever. Then I vividly remember something brushing against and then clinging to my arm. I thought it must be a hair or something… but then I look up and ahead of me is a teenage girl running her fingers through her very long thick black hair and tossing it around while trying to display some sort of mating ritual to her boyfriend. I look at my arm and it wasn't a single hair, it was a CLUMP of hair. Like, as if she was shedding Chewbacca level clumps of matted hair. I ran out of the lazy river and into the wave pool instead, where surely there was no harm to be done there. I mean, a wave pool means a great filter system where any hair would be quickly swept away into the drainage system right?
Hair yes, maxi pads, no. As it lazily floated past my shoulder and threatened to actually make contact with my skin (gaaaaaauuuughhh!!!) I knew my time in public swimming pools was going to be limited for life.
I was willing to make all the exceptions when I was pregnant and hot and burning like a furnace in the Shanghai heat. I got on the computer and started looking up water parks - which I can’t make sense of to this day - but who can make sense of a pregnant lady’s mind anyway right? I thought maybe Kai would like to splash around and all of the pictures of Maya Beach Water Park in Happy Valley looked super fun from the website. So I asked my driver about it and he pretty much had a heart attack saying I couldn’t and shouldn’t go. That made me want to go even more. I mean, who’s gonna tell me I can’t go to the water park and sit in a shallow kids’ pool that is 100% absolutely just urine? I found out later that he was so adamantly against me going not because I was pregnant (I apparently wouldn't have been granted entrance because of that fact anyway) but because going to a Shanghai water park was pretty much the equivalent of asking to be crammed into a Shanghai bus at peak rush hour but with water and way more people.
So I Google imaged the park and saw pics of people almost shoulder to shoulder in the water; pictures where yellow inner tubes are not even floating as they are forming their own stagnant island that people could begin to turn into a civilization like in the movie Water World. I don't know if it’s because the parks are only open a limited amount of time in the year, if it’s just the sheer population of China, or if it’s both. But it’s probably both.
So I bought myself… I mean the kids… a small blow up pool that I put into the back yard. I figured I’d have the best of both worlds: a private place to cool off free from any outside contaminates of stranger hair or maxi pads.
And then Oren pooped in the pool.
Summer ruined.
xoNiki
