As we head for a week holiday to Penticton to visit friends and watch Marshall’s hockey school here are a couple of shots of Dad and Nathan just hanging out trying to be cool
Watching the Billy Barker Days Parade
Trying on Mamma’s shades
Fresh Strawberries from Grampa’s Garden
Sweet Corn on the Cob (the Chinese corn is swill) and BBQ Burgers
As the Olympic athletes march into the Birds Nest Stadium in Beijing this August the second loudest cheers will be for Team Canada (obviously the cheers will be loudest for Team China). The reason for this is one person - Dashan aka Mark Rowswell who has been named Team Canada’s attache to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Just who is Dashan?
Dashan, AKA Mark Rowswell, is a multi-faceted performer and cultural ambassador who has been called “the most famous foreigner in China”. Although relatively unknown in the West, it’s hard to find anyone in China who does not know of Dashan.
Born and raised in Canada, Rowswell began studying Chinese in the mid 1980s, first at the University of Toronto and later at Beijing University. While in Beijing, Rowswell became interested in Chinese performing arts, particularly xiangsheng, a popular form of comic dialogue. A chance opportunity to appear on television suddenly gave Rowswell national exposure under the stage name “Dashan”. Repeated appearances on programs with an audience of up to 1 billion viewers gradually turned “Dashan” into a household name across China.
In China relatively few foreigners speak Mandarin fluently and Dashan was the pioneer in this area. His Chinese has been described as “perfect”. In 2001 he visited our school and the students and Chinese staff went absolutely insane. When he was introduced the emcee who was a Chinese national introduced him in English because the emcee was embarassed at his own level of Mandarin when compared to Dashan.
Here is a brief video of Dashan doing a commercial for the BC - Canada pavilion which recently opened in Beijing
When I was travelling to meet Alice’s family for the first time they were curious to know what my level of Chinese was. They kept asking “Is he as good as Dashan?’
Clearly not!
As some very funny folks pointed the rods and pins in my leg look auspiciously like the ancient Chinese instrument - the Er Hu. (Are Hoo). Of course the play on words joke is
“Do you play?”
“Play? Er Hu kidding?”
For comparisons let’s look at the photos
The Fix
The Er Hu
Eerie isn’t it?
And here is how it sounds
As they would say in the Cariboo … we made ‘er (as in home). The 20 plus hour journey went relatively well and we are now setting up shop in Quesnel. The kids were well behaved, Alice was a trooper as she had to look after the kids without much help from (ok .. no help from me). Yeah .. the leg was in pain pretty much the whole time … oh well .. got my leg up now.
Whenever I see the word(s) x-ray it reminds me of a bit by a comedian Mitch Hedberg (he passed away in 2005) who said that the letter ‘x’ should never start the word ‘xylophone” he felt it should be ‘zylophone” and that anyone who disagreed should have their head “z-rayed”
Anyhoodle … this post is for the purpose of showing the x-rays of my broken leg both before and after surgery
The first image shows the lower spiral break of the tibia just above the ankle and the upper fibula break beneath the knee.
The second image shows the rod inserted in my leg designed to bring the bones together. In a spiral break because the break is so far from horizontal there are a lot of shear forces if weight is ever put on the leg. To stabilize this the rod is designed to keep the whole thing from “slipping”.
Knowing the quality of Chinese construction techniques I am sure everything will be just fine.
As many of you might already know I broke my tibia and fibula almost 2 weeks ago and have been laid up ever since. I was hoping to post the x-ray photos but have not got around to that yet.
I did snap these 2 shots tonight but truthfully most of the visible damage (swelling, bruising) has long subsided.
No cast - just a rod running the length of my shin bone and lotsa pins
Some of the residual bruising.
Yup .. it still hurts a lot!
We packed the bags last night and are making final preparations for Sunday. Just thought I would give you a glimpse of who you are going to be seeing a lot of this summer.
See you soon!
