Yu Yuan Gardens

Hey all! These are a few pictures from our outing last Friday with two of Robb's class mates. CC has the longer hair and Kokia is wearing the hat in one of the pictures. Kokia took us to Yu Yuan Gardens which is a huge street market where you can buy pretty much anything. It gets to be quite the maze as you get towards the center of it all. On our way to the gardens, we took a bus and on the way there was a woman who must have gotten bus sick, because she whipped out this small plastic bag and started dry heaving....and I swear it sounded like she was throwing up hair balls. It was so hard to hear that I had to cover my mouth once, or else I may have grabbed that darn bag from her. Kokia saw me getting kind of sick, so she moved us toward the front where we stood and waited to get off. I felt sorta bad for the lady, because it is not fun being sick, and the person sitting next to her got up and moved to a different seat. I hope she feels better! We bought Robb a helmet for him to wear while he rides his scooter when we get home, and I took a picture of him with one on(the one we bought is black with a red start). The had some other colors, but black is totally stealth. The lady told us she could go no lower than 300 RMB which is about 42 dollars. We haggled her down to 150RMB, and she told Kokia and CC that they should be helping them and not us because we are foreigners! We ate at this little restaurant within the main part of the gardens and I was nervous. I do not do well with different food, I have a pretty sensitive gag reflex, and when we walked in Kokia said she would pick some stuff out for us. She showed me a bowl of steamed snails with their shells and asked me in all seriousness if I would like them...I had to tell her no, I don't eat snails. We ended up finding some stuff to eat and it was all stuff I hadn't eaten before. We got these dumpling type things that had cooked snail meat inside of them. Robb loved them, and kept trying to get me to try one....I eventually bucked up and tried one, so I wouldn't be such a woose, and it was good! I ate snail! We went to another shop to buy some Chinese art and we were haggling and had to walk out because they wouldn't give us the price we wanted, and the lady said in Chinglish that we were clever...one guy in the shop gave us the price we wanted and she crustied us all the way down the street! I was laughing so hard! Things here are amazing. I seriously wish I could bring all of you here and we could discover things together! My words and pictures do not come close to describing the things I see and experience here. Thanks for taking the time to visit our blog. It brings me happiness posting these things and sharing some of our life with others. Until next post....