Now my back was  completely normal.  As I mentioned, today was to be a special day at the preschool. This was the weekend of the Dragon Boat Festival, which  commemorates a Chinese poet who lived more than 2,000 years ago. It is a cultural festival as well as  a public holiday. It was also Fathers’ Day weekend. Today, the children’s fathers had been invited to visit the school. In some cases, mothers attended, and in other cases, both parents, but every child had a parent present.

Headmistress Chen wanted us to see the beautiful holiday scenes  the teachers had drawn on the chalkboards in the classrooms. There were videos about the holiday being presented on the monitors in each classroom.

There would be boat races on the weekend, but there are two other holiday traditions. Parents make braided bracelets of five strands of different colored silk threads for their children to wear.  Also, everyone worked together to prepare a holiday recipe called Zongzi. This is a sticky rice dumpling that is wrapped in a bamboo leaf and shaped like a pyramid. Both the parents and the  children enjoyed  doing these activities together, and we liked seeing the parents with their children. Some of the parents spoke a bit of English with us.

We thought  this would be our final dinner with Eric and Julian. Again, we took a cab to the restaurant mall. Our meal consisted of rice, spicy meat of some kind, lotus root, snow peas, cauliflower and onions, spicy tofu, and a fish salad. Eric remarked that he had really enjoyed meeting us. He thought it was amazing that we tried each and every food that was put before us, whether it sounded appetizing or not. More than that, he thought it was pretty amazing that we embarked on this trip! The trip was an adventure that we will always remember, and we are very glad that Julian and Eric were part of it.