Yigu Bigu and Bagels

Wednesday was an amazing day in the McCulloch household.  First, we got an incredible package in the mail from our friends Ryan and Sarah...complete with Old Bay Seasoning and sprinkles!  Wow.  Not only that, but we got our first delivery of homemade bagels from our ayi's friend who is starting a home-delivery baking company.  Let me tell you what...these bagels were awesome.  Even more exciting is the fact that a few weeks ago my friend Mel took me to a wholesale warehouse in our neighborhood where I was able to buy a huge block of cream cheese for a great price (unlike the Wal-mart's dagger prices).  Guess what's been for breakfast lately?!

The bagels arrived right at lunchtime so, of course, we had to sample them.  What's so funny is that Caroline has not had a bagel since she's been developed enough to even say the word bagel, so it was a new vocab word for her today that came out sounding more like "eagle" than "bagel." 



Just a little taste of Yigu Bigu

I suspect though that a certain Chinese kids' show might be to blame for the pronunciation difficulties.  You see, sometimes in the morning, while I'm furiously trying to get ready in order to be out the door by 8am, I let the girls watch this show on the kids' channel.  I have no idea what the name of the show is, but we call it "Yigu Bigu" (pronounced  Ee-goo Bee-goo), because that's apparently one of the characters' names (the girls have educated me about all this...I was pretty proud that they figured that all out since the show is in Chinese, and I had no idea what it was about.  See, tv is great learning tool!)  From what I can gather, it's essentially the Chinese version of Tele-tubbies, full of squishy, gibberish-speaking creatures who live in a very trippy alter-universe, with names that sound like "Maka Baka" and "Upsy Daisy."  It's all quite frightening when I stop to watch it.  Anyway, I think that show's the reason why bagels in our house are now going to be called "Yigu Bigus."

Update:  After a little digging, I discovered that Yigu Bigu is actually a show from England called "In the Night Garden" (don't you think that name makes it even creepier?).  The show in Britain features a character named "Iggle Piggle" (transliterated into Chinese as "Yigu Bigu").  Here's a crazy quote from the producer:  "We wanted to explore the difference between being asleep and being awake from a child's point of view: the difference between closing your eyes and pretending to be asleep and closing your eyes and sleeping."  What????  Click here to read the whole wikipedia article (which I found truly frightening and it made me thankful that the version we watch here is all in Chinese so we don't really understand what it's all about.)