Social Saturday

We had our first play date today with Wendy and her one year old son, Jordan. Wendy is an expat from Dallas and has been living in Shanghai for 2 years. We were introduced by a mutual acquantaince in Dallas. Wendy works for Mary Kay, which has been operating in China for 12 years now (who knew?), and is committed to stay in Shanghai for 4 years. So far, she really likes it here. Partly because she has a car and driver (courtesy of her company) and an ayi to look after her son. And she speaks Mandarin fluently because she's Taiwanese. If you have the money (or a good expat package), Shanghai would be an easy place to live.

Wendy and I took the tikes to the Shanghai Aquarium. For kids, it is fantastic --- there are plenty of ifferent things to look at and it is fairly small so the kids wouldn't be overwhelmed or overly excited for too long. For adults, it is disappointing. There are several points on the tour where you are under the aquarium so that there are fish and (very small) sharks swimming above you. There is even a person dressed up like a fish for you to take pictures with. Sydney was too scared to get close to the Fish Man so there's no picture to show.

The kiddos were just fairly interested in each other. They were more intrigued with all of the fun creatures swimming about.

Everyone got along well enough that we are going to plan another play date. It may just be for the Moms though.

Unfortunately, Sydney was too worked up from her new friend and the exciting water animals that she did not take her afternoon nap. As all you moms know, all bets are off if they don't sleep on schedule. So we headed out to dinner with our friends, Sam and Dom, with alot of apprehension (on my part atleast). Sydney has been the only baby that I've seen at all of the restaurants that we've been to. People typically leave their kids at home with the ayi to go out to eat. So you can't expect the restaurant to have high chairs, although some do. We went to a Manchurian restaurant that did not have one, which meant that Sydney couldn't feed herself, which meant that she got restless and had to walk around, which meant that I had to follow her. She didn't have a melt down and thanks to Sam and Dom, a good dinner was had by all.

The restaurant was a bit overwhelming to the senses -- very cheesy, very kitschy and very red. The restaurant is on the 2nd floor so when you leave, several waitresses will stand by the stairs and sing LOUDLY "Good bye, good bye. Be careful walking down the stairs" (in Chinese, of course) over and over again until you are out the door.

I let Sam order for the table and the food was fantastic. I never would have ordered the things that he ordered, so I'm glad he did. We had sauteed eggplant in garlic and some kind of vinagretty sauce, combination platter of dumplings stuffed with spinach, pork, chicken or lamb, another platter of dumplings stuffed with some kind of vegetable, a pork, egg and celery plate that was amazing. And we also shared a big pot of tea. The total cost = US$11. Both Sydney and I loved it all.

By the end of dinner, it was well past Sydney's bedtime and let's just say that the taxi ride home was not a fun one. But the rest of the day was.