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For our first full day in China, we were celebrating Mother's Day and our 29th Anniversary. Horton had said the night before that he would like to take us to the Sentosa Hotel for their breakfast buffet. This is the hotel where Jim used to stay when he was working for Tyco. Although it had been almost a year since he was last there, one of the waiters recognized him. We enjoyed breakfast, which had traditional Chinese items as well as some American things, including an omelet bar. Leah and I tried Congee, which I would describe as a watery rice porridge. I had read about it as a common breakfast for many Chinese and was able to teach Horton the American name for it!
After breakfast, we went shopping at a store called Lotus, probably 10 minutes from our apartment. It was like a Super Walmart, just that it had some very different items! Leah was quite the attraction, Horton explained that most of the people there had probably never seen an American child, only adults. Shanghai has many foreigners, but we are about an hour outside of Shanghai and there aren't many here (on our 4th day here,
I haven't seen one yet). Anyway, Leah was overloaded with attention! One family (they weren't Chinese, Horton said maybe Indian) was following us around and I finally told Leah to stand next to the girl and I took there picture, then they quit following us. The more unusual things were all of the live seafood (including some pretty big turtles!), the meat piled loosely on tables of ice (we bought prepackaged, recognizable meat cuts!), and chicken feet! Horton said that they eat every part of the chicken except the feathers! Leah liked all of the cute little characters on so much of the packaging and kept busy taking pictures of it while we shopped. We found enough food to get us started, then went to the upper level and got Chinese sim cards for our phones and some other things. They have "escalators" that are like ramps and you take the carts on it and somehow the wheels catch, clever, but the carts are terrible to push and steer otherwise!
After we took our purchases home, Horton took us to lunch at a restaurant in a very old building, he said supposedly 2000 years old! I didn't get a
picture of the outside, but there is a beautiful little park next to it that we plan to go back to.
A couple of the restaurants we've been to have little couches to sit on, comfortable at first, but kind of awkward to eat from. Leah got some juice which had this fancy butterfly made from an apple slice!
On the way back to the apartment, we stopped at the local gym for a tour. They have a pool which hopefully Leah will get to swim in and a lot of nice exercise equipment, and then when we looked at the aerobics room, they were just starting a small class and invited Leah to join them. She did one song with them and had fun!We had been told that there was an exercise room here in Ace Gardens, but it turns out that what they call an exercise room has Ping Pong and a pool table! I don't think that isn't going to help me lose weight!
The English interpretations of signs are quite amusing, here's the "caution" sign from the cafeteria in our apartment building.
We were supposed to be going out to dinner after a
rest, but were actually very relieved when Horton said that he couldn't make it - we were ready for a break!Jim and I took long naps and then had a late dinner and early to bed.
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