Last Weekend

I'm so far behind on blogging, that I'm just going to start writing about recent things and hopefully I'll fit in the things I wanted to write about from before.

Last Saturday was a really fun day. In the morning, Melanie and I took Britton, Haley, and Jonas to the playroom at the Resort Center. Shane had to stay back so Ezra could take a nap and he "needed" Jason to stay with him. In other words, they played Xbox all morning.

The kids loved the playroom. It's kind of like a McDonald's playland, but on a larger scale. It's a huge room full of tunnels, slides, ropes to swing on, and a little bouncy thing. It was fun to just let the kids run around and play for a few hours while I could sit and talk to Melanie.

For lunch, we went over to a new little sandwich shop in Clifford called Jessica's. She was having a free lunch buffet for all the teachers. She has really great food and is really trying hard to get the Westerners in there to eat. She had tons of things out for us to try. Her baguette sandwiches are really yummy with good meat and fresh vegetables. She had good salads, egg rolls, quiche, cheesecake, and brownies. I think we'll definitely be eating there quite often. (Actually, we've already been there 3 different times--once for dinner, and twice for her free lunch buffet.)

In the afternoon, Melanie and I went shopping and the boys took the kids swimming at the clubhouse. I hadn't been grocery shopping inside Clifford yet. We went to the wet market first for fruits, vegetables, and meat. They have so many different kinds of fruits and vegetables that I've never seen before. And tons of different meats (a lot that I don't even want to what they are). It's fun picking out different things to try and it's so cheap. I feel like I'm getting so many groceries, and then it ends up being less than $10. I love it!

At the other supermarket, things are starting to look recognizable to me. It's so weird at first because it's hard to tell what everything is when it's packaged differently than in the States and has Chinese writing all over it. It just looks strange even if it's the same things as we have. I finally found some fake Legos for Britton, too, so I got Haley and him a few surprises. (They still don't have very many toys, so they don't have much to do during the day.)

In the evening, the Aiee's came over to babysit and we went out to dinner with Melanie, Shane, Rina, and Brad. All the kids and the Aiee's played together rotating from each apartment. We live on the 6th floor, Mel and Shane on the 9th, and Rina and Brad on the 17th. The kids all have a blast playing together. Our Aiee also brought her 10 year old son and Britton was so excited about that.
We went to a neighboring city to a hotpot restaurant called the Little Fat Sheep or something like that. You sit at round tables and there is a big pot of boiling broth in the center. Then you order different things and throw them in the pot to cook them. We got the pot split with half spicy broth and half not-spicy broth (mostly for us). We ordered lamb, beef, different mushrooms, different tofus, potatoes, cabbage, sprouts, rice noodles and then egg rolls and these little bread scone-type things. I'm glad that we were with other people because we wouldn't have ordered half that stuff. But, it was fun trying new things. It's a really fun place to go because you are there for several hours and you can just sit and talk while you throw different things into the pot.