11-25-09 Lunch, shopping & Dinner

After the park we went to an official Jade Market and bought Melin a jade bracelet for when she gets older then we had our driver drop us off at the downtown shopping district and we had lunch at Pizza Hut, (the waitresses were all dressed up for Christmas) and then had ice cream at McDonald's afterwards and let the girls play on a Giant Shoe for toddlers. Meilin is not a fan of western food, didn't like the pizza, or the ice cream so we bought her some mashed potatoes at KFC. We then took a taxi home and put the girls down for a nap.

There is a young lady that works at the front desk that speaks really good English and has helped us several times, her name is Sarah. We were talking with her the other day, asking her where to eat and we said maybe we could go out for dinner one night. So after the girls naps she took us to a Hot Pot restaurant. A Hot Pot is where they have a large pot with boiling water and two sections, one spicy and one not. We had tofu, beef, chicken, stomach, shrimp, spinach, mushrooms, mint, and potato. They dump everything in and let it cook in the boiling water and then you did in your chop sticks and pull out what you want. It was very good. Brian ate something that was way spicy and burned his mouth pretty good, which is saying something as usually it can't be spicy enough for him. Jodie had no problem with it though and thoroughly enjoyed the tofu and vegetables. The girls were a living terror at dinner, running around being noisy and basically being two year olds. Luckily Sarah had reserved a private room for us on the third floor and so it was easy to control them. On the first floor there was a buffet you could do that was very unique. There was a channel of water that circulated throughout the floor, and they would put the food on floating dishes and they would travel throughout the restaurant and you would just lean over from your table and grab what you wanted. It was really cool!!!