Family goes to New Jersey and meets friends
6 de noviembre de 2005
(November 6, 2005)
It was a fun weekend for the Wang family in Lexington, Massachusetts. On Friday night, November 4, 2005, the family left home around 5:00 or 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time and began their trip to New Jersey. During the whole car ride, Raymond Wang, 8, sat in the back, while his brother, Bryan, 5, and Mom sat in the middle. Dad was the driver.
Throughout the car ride, Bryan kept forgetting the destination state. He asked Mom, "Where are we going?" Mom had to keep answering him, "New Jersey." And each time this happened, Dad said to Mom, "他记不住" ("Tā jì bù zhù", which means, "he can't remember" in Chinese). Ray, who was sitting peacefully, comfortably, and quietly in the back, didn't mind. He kept enjoying the scene, looking out the window, even as the sky was dark, and thinking about Pajama Sam and Freddi Fish games. After four or five hours, they finally reached their destination in New Jersey. The destination was a family friend's house. In that house, Ray and Bryan met two young boys to play with. Their names were Alex and Justin. However, because it was around 10 or 11 by the time the Wang family arrived, and because it was getting very late, everyone in the house quickly went to bed. They woke up in the morning, on Saturday, November 5.
On Saturday morning, Dad and Ray went to a tennis court within a 5-minute walk from the house. There, they played tennis. Then, they went back to the house. They spent all day Saturday there, and they had breakfast there on Sunday morning before beginning the trip home to Massachusetts. It was a lot of fun. Especially for Ray, who has loved traveling and sightseeing, who enjoyed the long 5-hour car ride from Massachusetts to New Jersey. The car ride back was also fun. This has been a very good year for Ray, who earlier this year, went on a 3-month vacation to China. On May 25, 2005, he went to Hastings Elementary School for his last day of school before the long vacation. At 1:30 p.m. that day, he and his class had a party in the classroom, which he and his favorite teacher, Mollie Chamberlain, referred to as a "Twelfth of Never party." They had chicken nuggets, which Ray referred to as "chicken knuckles," in reference to the chicken knuckles in one of his favorite computer games, Spy Fox: Dry Cereal; in that game, the cantina in the game sometimes serves chicken knuckles as the daily special. Spy Fox can buy the chicken knuckles. The condiment known as "Beet Bliss," according to the label on the bottle, "may cause drowsiness in alligators." This plays an important role near the end of the game. After Spy Fox successfully disarms William the Kid's "milky weapon of destruction," William the Kid taunts him, laughing and still feeling confident that Spy Fox will never catch him. To do this, William reasons, Spy Fox would have to find the secret ascot. However, as William is saying farewell, William tries to shut the door to the secret path, thus leaving the ascot visible as a clue for Spy Fox to locate the secret path. The path is hidden behind a billboard. However, between the billboard and the cow pen where the cows are being held captive, there is one last roadblock that Spy Fox must face: a pool of hungry alligators. The solution? Those alligators love the chicken knuckles. If the chicken knuckles are dressed in "Beet Bliss," the alligators fall asleep after eating them, allowing Spy Fox to walk across them to get to the cow pen and save the cows. Spy Fox then goes to the blimp operated by William the Kid. With the help of Monkey Penny, who works with Spy Fox on this mission, Spy Fox sends William the Kid to jail.
On May 26, 2005, Raymond, Bryan, Mom, and Dad got up early in the morning and went to the airport. They took a plane to Canada, and from there, they took a second plane to Beijing, China. Once they arrived, there was a picture of the Great Wall of China on one of the walls at the airport. Ray and Bryan stood in front of that wall, and Mom took a picture of both kids. At this point, it was lunchtime. At nighttime, they took a train to Weifang, where Ray's uncle, aunt, and cousin live. They arrived the morning of Saturday, May 28th, and they stayed over for five days, until Thursday, June 2. The first three days were fun, but on June 1 and June 2, Ray got sick and, in the middle of the night, the early hours of June 1, he threw up in a bucket. On Thursday, June 2, 2005, Ray, Bryan, Mom, and Dad went to Guangzhou where a large majority of the 3-month vacation took place. The apartment had 26 floors, and they lived on the seventh floor, in room 7D. By June 3, Ray had recovered from his sickness. Ray and Bryan had a lot of fun playing Spy Fox, Freddi Fish, and Pajama Sam games together on the laptop, and the two kids had a lot of fun talking about pairs of items that cannot be in the inventory at the same time. They would take turns making statements of the form, "You can't have ____ and _____ at the same time." For example, in Spy Fox: Dry Cereal, it is impossible to have the "Spy Putty" and the "Frog Suit" at the same time because the Spy Putty is needed to get the invitation to the deck party on the ship, the SS Deadweight, and the Frog Suit is on the ship itself. In Freddi Fish 5, you cannot have the "Planktos" and the "Glow Necklace" at the same time. The "Planktos" item is required to get the bracelet, which is required to play the claw machine game, which itself is required to get the "Glow Necklace."
Raymond stayed in Guangzhou for 86 days. He lived in that apartment from June 2, 2005, until August 27, 2005. However, it was only for the first 12 days of the entire vacation that all four family members were together in China at the same time. On June 8, the third week of the vacation, Dad went back to Boston, leaving Ray, Mom, and Bryan there to play. On June 25, Mom and Bryan went back, too, but Ray was not alone. His grandmother and uncle looked after him instead. This continued for four weeks until the night of July 21, when Dad returned to the apartment in Guangzhou to spend the rest of the vacation with Ray. Dad bought him three new games:
- Freddi Fish 4 (The Case of the Hogfish Rustlers of Briny Gulch)
- Spy Fox 3 (Operation Ozone)
- Pajama Sam 3 (You Are What You Eat From Your Head to Your Feet)
Dad was well aware of Ray's love for the Spy Fox, Freddi Fish, and Pajama Sam adventure game series, and when they talked on the phone, Ray mentioned wanting specifically those games. Those games were featured as demos on his copy of Freddi Fish 5; he liked the demos and wanted to play the full versions.
Every morning, Ray would go to a hospital that was a 10-minute walk from the apartment. While at the hospital, he would get needles for therapy and drink herb tea. He loves math, and he is very advanced for his age. In the first two months of 2005, he was turning decimals into fractions. He often wrote and solved math problems on his "Magna Doodle."
Let's start very simple: 0.5 = =
It's also very helpful to know this one as well: 0.75 = = = .
Of course, and are both very common fractions in real life, with many real-life applications. But Ray enjoyed his hobby so much that he would often make up his own decimals and turn them into fractions for fun. On the night of 5/25/2005, the night before his vacation, he decided to write 0.525 because "5/25" and "525" have the same digits, in the same order, then turn it into a fraction.
0.525 = = =
When Dad arrived in July, in addition to the computer games, he also brought a scientific calculator. Ray had learned about sine, cosine, and tangent from a computer game earlier that month, and when he saw the "sin," "cos", and "tan" buttons on the calculator, Ray asked Dad about them.
Ray and Dad stayed in Guangzhou for five weeks, and they made many fun memories during that time. On July 22, Ray and Dad walked to the hospital for the first time. Sometime during their session that day, it began raining, so instead of walking back to the apartment, they took a taxi instead. In the middle of the night on July 23/24, 2005, Ray somehow suddenly remembered the word "synonyms," which he learned about at school. He also remembered what it meant: synonyms are words with the same or similar meanings. On the morning of July 24, Ray cried for a few seconds when he found out that his uncle was leaving and that his uncle won't return to the apartment. In the afternoon of July 24, Ray and Dad went to a park and rode one of the boats.
Ray played Pajama Sam 3 on the laptop and liked the fact that, in the middle of the river, there is a tunnel that looks perfectly like a human heart. From the "heart" tunnel, there are four paths you can take:
- 1) Exit back to town
- 2) Muscle Beach
- 3) The Foothills
- 4) The Bluburbs
Ray, being 8, believed the locations in the game were actually what the inside of the heart looked like. When he saw Muscle Beach for the first time, he believed Pajama Sam was inside his heart, and Dad played along and said, "Do you feel him?" Ray said yes.
On August 26, 2005, Ray and Dad studied the elevator in the apartment. In China, there is a superstition involving the number four because the Chinese word for "four" sounds like the Chinese word for "death." In the elevators, there were no buttons for the second and third floors, and 4 was written as "5A", 14 as "13A", and 24 as "23A." On August 27, Ray and Dad went to Shenzhen. Ray was introduced to the 24-hour clock for the first time. There was a digital clock on the bus that he and Dad took, and Ray was surprised to see "13:00" instead of "1:00 p.m." and "14:00" instead of "2:00 p.m." On August 28, Ray and Dad went to a snow dome and went skiing. On August 30, Ray and Dad returned to China. Mom's birthday was August 6, and during phone calls, Mom promised to save one slice for Ray, which she did.
On September 7, 2005, Ray went to Hastings School for the first time in three months and began third grade.
In mid-October, Ray asked his parents for Pajama Sam 2: Thunder and Lightning Aren't So Frightening. A few days later, Ray was in the basement when Mom came downstairs and gave him the game.
Yesterday evening, around sunset, Ray and Dad took a taxi to a park. Today, on November 6, 2005, Ray, Bryan, Mom, and Dad had breakfast with Alex and Justin before going home to Lexington, Massachusetts.