For FHE last night we went out.  We got on Bus #1 and rode back into some suburb/city part of Guangzhou (I don’t know, it all just looks and feels crowded to me).  We wandered a little and Miss S. tried on some shoes (no flip-flops allowed at her school).  We walked into a shoe store and she realized she wasn’t wearing socks, so they gave her a plastic bag to put on her foot as a “sock”.   I don’t know the Chinese proverb for “necessity is the mother of invention”, but I thought that was a pretty good one.  The sizing here is different from the U.S.  In U.S. sizing she wears a 9 1/2 or a 10.  In whatever sizing they use here, she wears a 40.  Whichever way you do it, the end result is they don’t sell shoes in our sizes (at least the women’s shoes), so we will have to buy shoes in the U.S. and bring or have them shipped over here. 

We wandered some more, looking at the variety of shops and a place to eat dinner (I really hate the way they tend to serve meat here – a chicken is just chopped up willy-nilly, bones and all and then cooked and served that way).  We found the KungFu Restaurant.  A sort of Chinese-style fast food place.  The food was pretty good and I managed to avoid getting anything with the meat with the bones all chopped up.  I’ve always thought I was pretty open-minded about food, but I have to say, I’m tired of meat with bones and it’s in almost everything.

After that, Mr. Hot Stuff and Mr. J. went to the “Silicone Valley Computer City” to buy a computer printer.  The girls and I went wandering through a shopping center where Sara found a bag for school.  We then rejoined Mr. Hot Stuff and Mr. J as they were finalizing the printer purchase.  We crammed into a bus to come back home.  Someone had an overloaded shopping basket blocking the aisle so no one could get by to the back seats on the bus, and those in the back had a very difficult time getting off the bus.  The shopping baskets people take to the market here look something like the 2-wheeled versions pictured here.

Oh! I almost forgot.  The whole reason we ate dinner out yesterday was because our 30 boxes arrived at our house right at the time I needed to be fixing dinner.  The delivery man left just moments before Mr. Hot Stuff got home from work.  So we now have all our stuff, but no place to put it.  Payday is soon.  Hopefully we will be able to make some changes to improve our home then.  I am VERY happy to have the spices and seasonings that I packed and all the school, art, and office supplies.  Some of these things I am finding in the local shops but it is nice to have them now without having to go buy them right away.

We have the master bathroom shower mostly fixed so we don’t have to mop up 3 centimeters of water from the floor every time we take a shower. Yea!

Now if I can just find a Mandarin teacher…