Shopping

Kim would have been in heaven! We went to one of the shopping districts today because we wanted to find some more reading material. We stopped at the Beijing APM, which is a six story shopping mall. They didn't have what we wanted but the info clerk pointed us down the street. As we walked along the wide, pedestrian street there were high end stores, department stores and all sorts of shops. We saw a Nike store and checked the prices but were surprised to find that the converted prices were the same as what we would get back home, or sometimes higher!

Eventually we found the bookstore. It wasn't hard to spot because it was another six story building with "Wangfujing Bookstore" written in big red letters. We found a few rows of English novels on the third floor. There wasn't much of a selection for the girls, but Nadim and I found what we were looking for. We agreed to buy books that we could pass on to each other, so the romance novels and horror paperbacks were out. Eventually we settled on a couple of books for us and a couple for the kids and moved on.

After a quick stop for lunch we made our way to a big toy store that we had seen. The girls enjoyed browsing. Much of the things were similar to what we have back home, and the prices were similar as well. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't uniquely Chinese toys. The girls went home with a craft to make wooden doll furniture. They had great fun putting it together later in the afternoon and then playing with their new pieces.

I'm not much of a shopper. The only things we seem to be buying are grocery items. I thought I'd share a picture of some of the items we've been eating.

The night we arrived in China, Nadim went out to pick up bread. We both had a good laugh over the brand name! The little brown fruit in the bowl seem to be pretty popular. I've never seen them back home, but Nadim is familiar with it from Iran (Senjed). They are kind of like little apples. In any case we seem to be managing fine with food. We don't have a lot of the things we eat at home, but we're trying new things and finding others that are similar to our good ol' favourites.

CM