小天使(475)-Having fun on the Playground in Beijing

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by 冰溪
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During our two and a half weeks' stay in Beijing about a month ago, poor Evan didn't have anyone his age to play with at my parent's apartment. In fact, when I had to head out, the average age of the people he spent time with was 77 (my parents and my grandmother)!

He mainly just played with his Lego and cars, studied the toy and birthday catalogs and watched movies "Cars", "Madagascar" and "Jarrasic Park III" like millions of times, especially "Cars" and I was very surprised that he was not afraid of the "Jarrasic Park" at all.

Even though he never complained, I knew he must have been bored being trapped in the apartment simply by the fact that he was so excited when we took him out to the playground that he couldn't even walk straight!

There is a primary school within five-minute walking distance of my parents' apartment. It has a huge playground including a soccer field surrounded by plastic running tracks and a bunch of kids appropriate exercising apparatus on the side such as climbers, slides...etc. My mother and I tried to take Evan out there everyday to get some fresh air.

Whenever we were out, Evan was so happy and always running ahead of us or zigzagging, or making funny moves as if he didn't know what to do with himself and he could not stop giggling!. He would try almost every apparatus on the playground even though some of them were for the bigger kids (he would need my help) and they were very cold to hold on to since they were made of steel.

There were always some kids from the primary school playing there too and one time we even saw two mixture girls playing there with their parents and the older one could speak both Chinese and English fluently which made me envy their mommy so much :). 

Evan didn't really socialize with the kids who played there even after we encouraged him to. He knows that they speak different languages. Unlike Olivia, he may try to socialize with a kid by passing a toy to him/her but he generally doesn't initiate a talk with a stranger.

One time he was following a bigger kid around but then the boy said to his friends: "Hey, he doesn't know how to speak Chinese. He is speaking English. We don't understand English, so let's not play with him". Poor Evan :(. I told him right there that it is important for him to learn Chinese so that he could play with these Chinese kids on the playground but his facial expression told me that he couldn't care less about it :(.