After walking a bit further, we found an amusement park area. Brock made the comment that it felt like Wally World, because we were the only ones there; we had it all to ourselves. The kids rode a self-propelled monorail type of ride, a ride that went in circles, cars that went through a fake safari (you had to shoot animals in order to get your car to continue), bumper cars, and a small roller coaster.
We continued on to a lagoon area where we paid for the 5 kids to ride on a 6-passenger pedal boat. Twice, one of the employees had to motor boat out to them – once to stop them from reaching up to touch trees and once to tell them to stop rocking the boat. After the second time, he motioned for them to come in and we thought they were getting kicked out, but instead, he made Brock get on the boat with them. Those crazy Americans causing trouble again!
After a very long day at the park, we were all hungry. We attempted to eat at a restaurant within the Marriott that had come highly recommended by other adopting families, but the waitress disappeared on us after bringing hot tea. After taking a long time to study the menu, we all began murmuring about how bad the tea tasted (it had a nasty after taste). We didn’t really care for the menu prices either and most of the dishes were too exotic for us…though we’ve seen some exotic things on the menus at some of the other places we’ve eaten, this one seemed to be only exotic stuff. We all agreed to pay for the tea and leave. We ended up back at McDonald’s. It was quick & cheap.
We then went to a shopping area where I bought Shaling a couple of traditional Chinese dresses and 3 different hand fans for 100RMB (about $15 American dollars). Earlier this morning, before going to the park, I bought her 3 pair of jeans (thick, warm, lined ones) and a winter coat that she fell in love with, all for 446RMB (about $68 American dollars). The winter coat I had at home for her is a size too big, as are most of the jeans I have in her closet. We finished the day off by letting Preston & the girls play Wii while Kim & I caught up on email and Brock, Carl, Matt & Andrew went alley shopping again.
We are dead tired and hoping to go to bed early, as we have to get up to a wake-up call tomorrow. We are being picked up at 8:45 a.m. to go to Shenzhen, which is Shaling’s hometown. Tomorrow is our orphanage visit day. We will be in the van for about 2 hours each way, so it will prove to be a long day (and probably pretty emotional too).
Some of the more interesting signs we saw around the park:
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