A walk in the park

We decided to take it easy today and just hang around the neighbourhood. After some home schooling, we walked to a nearby park - the same one where we had seen the ping pong players. We used some of the exercise equipment and watched the ping pong games for a while.


Then we moved on to another area, where we noticed people were dancing. We did not recognize the beats of the first song, but then they played what sounded like a cha-cha. So we used our dancing lessons and did a little cha-cha. We felt like stars because we gained quite an audience! Someone even video taped us dancing :-) This offered an opportunity for us to speak to a few people. One of the ladies came over and invited Christina to dance with her. They danced a Chinese style dance and Christina was pretty quick to pick it up!

After the park, we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things. I saw packages of frozen meat on skewers that looked interesting, but wasn't sure what kind of meat they were. So I asked the attendant if it was beef, but he did not know English. He was about to go get someone to help, but I stopped him and said "Mooo?" He lauged and answered "No, Baaa!" I guess they were lamb skewers!

After lunch and some more home schooling, we went to the nearby park with books in hand. The girls played and we read our books for a bit. We ended up meeting an older gentleman who was learning English. He was happy to practise with us. Although retired, he has taught himself to read and speak English by listening to voice recordings and following a Beijing University English book. He dedicates 3 to 4 hours a day to English practice. Our English lesson to him did not come free - we asked him to teach us how to say and write numbers in Chinese. We had a good laugh over our attempts to pronounce the words with the right tone. He also wrote Yasmin and Roya's names in Chinese, and told them they had to learn their Chinese numbers.

NM + CM