Pearls and Pinching

We went to the "pedestrian street" today to shop and tour. We are escorted around town in a huge luxury bus along with our guide, Elvin, and about 5 other families from our agency. The bus is great, but it is overkill for the small amount of seats we take up on the huge machine. It is with great skill that the driver has to manuever this big bus through the very busy streets. The turning radius is amazing, and they clearly know, by the inch, when and how to turn and change lanes without causing a wreck. It is a science.

The pedestrian street was a street closed off to cars, which had stores on all sides and mini malls to shop. It was very busy, and interesting. The bargains were incredible. I could have spent a lot more time, and money, but Greg was hovering......

So, I managed to buy some pearls (they strung the necklaces right in front of me), some clothes for the girls and some t-shirts (sorry Chase, no orange chicken, you have to settle for a t-shirt....).

We then came back to the hotel to relax. We have noticed that Danielle has no grieving episodes at all now. She is pretty happy most of the time, unless we are reprimanding her for either a.) Pinching (seems to be a favorite way to get your attention right now), b.) tossing all trash on the floor, or c.) spitting (this is definately cultural). Looking at this small list of irritants makes me feel so wonderful - if this is all that she has going on for us to work on with her, we win. Game over. I'll take it.

So after we had a couple of fun wrestling matches with Danielle and then regrouped, we headed back to Shaiman Island for dinner. We ate at the Cow and the Bridge. I should take a poll to see if anyone would guess the correct cuisine of this restaurant. Not Chinese. Ok, close enough, it was Thai. We always like Thai food at home and this was no exception. The food was great. We walked a bit more around the island, took pictures at the famous White Swan hotel (a haven for adoptive families) and then made our way back to the hotel. In the cab ride back to the hotel, we were trying to correctly pronounce the name of Danielle's province, Urumqi, which we have heard pronounced 5 different ways. As we were saying Urumqi, Danielle just cracked up laughing and tried to help us say it correctly. Each time we repeated after her, she just laughed....stupid Americans.....

We felt like some dessert tonight, but the one scoop of Hagen Daaz ice cream containers at the hotel were 55 yuan each which is almost 10 dollars. Yep, that is some pricey ice cream. Greg volunteered to go to the 7-11 to pick up some ice cream (there are 7-11s everywhere here, but they are tiny - the whole store can barely fit 10 people in it at once). So we enjoyed some ice cream and chocolate cake from the local convenience store.
We are excited to pick up Danielle's visa tomorrow and head to the airport. We will be going to Beijing tomorrow night. We are going to try to stay up as late as possible tomorrow night in Beijing so that when we board our flight to come home early Friday morning, we may just sleep the whole way to Chicago!