Swings, starbucks, and sewing machines

I couldn't think of a better title for this post since I already used "Ningbo Weekend" the last time we went to the city for fun. But, before I jump to the weekend, Milan and I took a bike ride to a tea shop/restaurant with swings instead of chairs. What could be more fun on a cold rainy Friday morning?

The bike ride was cold, but the swings made up for it. So did the vegan brownie in my purse

Then on Saturday we jumped on the school-sponsored bus to a clothing sale in Ningbo, with the intention of ditching the sale and taking a taxi to the center of town to check it out. But the clothing sale was at an actual clothing factory out in the middle of nowhere, so we were stuck shopping for clothes. It was actually pretty interesting to see the factory and all of the men and women working off the specific patterns for each piece they were making. It wasn't an assembly line set-up, but seemed like each sewer was making multiple copies of an entire jacket, pants, or top pattern.

It was cold in that big room. Makes me think about where my clothes come from when I take them off the rack

Then there was the "sale" room. Imagine everything in your local TJMax store crammed into a closet-sized room with about half the population of China shopping there all at once. Milan stayed out in the factory area while Tim and I took turns briefly looking at the clothes.

We left with two very nice sweatshirts for about $8 each. Very warm for the cold weather that has been creeping up in the past couple weeks.

Proudly celebrating Dutch Universities

We then proceeded with our plan to check out the downtown area and headed to Tian Yi Square, the upscale fancy-shopping area in Ningbo. We didn't do an actual shopping, but we had lunch at an interesting "Italian Pizzeria" restaurant. Pizza Hut was just around the corner, but that isn't very interesting. And I'm pretty sure Pizza Hut doesn't have these egg-shaped fortune tellers on every table:

Endless entertainment

All you do is give your 2-year old a one-yuan coin which he inserts into the nose area, and out comes a little plastic pellet with your horoscope/fortune and a cartoon inside! Repeat until you run out of coins, or until you realize that the price of the fortunes has exceeded the price of your lunch. The food was pretty good too. I had a "skillet" meal with beef and eggs.

The Chinese Denny's skillet meal?

I was enjoying my eggs since we never have them in the house (because of Milan's allergies). And since we never have them in the house and it has been so long since he has had a reaction to them, I wondered if maybe his sensitivity to eggs was going down at all. Every time he has a blood test to measure his allergies, the milk and the egg allergies keep going down. So I did what I usually do when I want to see how he might react to something - I smear a spot of it on his forehead. And off we went to wander around the area some more...


We came across this fun game. I had seen pictures of it before we moved here when I searched the internet for any information about Ningbo. You can zip your child into a sealed bubble and send them out onto the fountain to roll around. Milan was dying to try it, but we said not this time.

Then we went to Starbucks while we waited for our taxi ride back to Beilun. As soon as we sat down in our comfortable chairs with our sweet yummy milky (soy-milky in my case) taste of home, Milan turned to me and could have passed for a Klingon child. His forehead had taken a half hour to react to that little smear of egg, and his entire forehead broke out in hives. And then he pooped. So much for a relaxing hour in Starbucks. Luckily he didn't notice the hives and didn't feel itchy at all and they went away with a little hydrocortisone. So, guess what: he is still really sensitive to eggs. Now I know.

And than about sums up our weekend. Hope you had a good one too!