2nd Day In Ningbo, China

Date : 031106
Time : 10:30AM

Woke up at 1030 bummed ard, met the maid, who was already in the midst of cleaning up the house. Ate breakfast, Ramen Char Mee (Myojo Singapore) instant noodles with an egg haha.

Time : 12:45PM

Met up with the next door neighbour, good fren of my mom's, Auntie Binny. Her family's from India. We went to this trendy and pretty huge shophouse/shopping center (something like bugis junction). It was a maze of shops everywhere, mainly female clothing stores. It's certainly a shopping haven for girls, reasonably cheap too. I bet if a Singaporean teen/yuppy were to come here, theyd go crazy and shop non stop haha. There were a few roadside stalls too. Smelled pretty nasty but a lot of locals were buying the food. They sold barbecued squid/meat and some other stuff. Who knows wat meat theyre using haha. Another thing that caught my attemtion was that rubbish bins were put right smack in the middle of an intersection/pathway. WTH? we were walking past filthy rubbish bins everywhere we walked. The shopkeepers would just throw rubbish out of their store into the pathways. They have a principle of 'as long as its not in my shop, its none of my concern', leaving the cleaners to clean up the mess. It was pretty insensitive and crude but i guess that's the culture here. However, most of the locals were dressed pretty well, like any other young teen in Singapore! I certainly didnt expect that before coming here haha. Auntie Binny couldnt find the stuff she wanted so we went to another shopping center about 1-2 km away.

This place had a KFC and i bought a Zinger for lunch. It was pretty much the same taste here as in Singapore. Now this shopping center is really similar to Joo Chiat Complex, more mazy though, tons of shops. Auntie Binny found stuff she was looking for, buying a long sleeve blouse, semi-formal pants and 3/4 pants for about 60 -80 singapore dollars only! cheap huh. Saw a few moms with their babies. The babies had this diamond shaped hole in their clothes around their butt, where their diapers jutted out. Apparently, according to my mom, they had the hole so that when they needed to shit or pee, they would juz open the diapers and they could do it through the hole! haha Havent seen it happen personally though. It was about 3 30pm now and we decided to head home as the kids would be coming back from school. Made a detour to a tailor, but it was closed so we just went home. Picked the kids up as they came down from the school bus.

Time : 4:00PM

The kids had their lunch and brought the dog out to the garden to play with it. Pretty cute dog, Russ is his name. Nat held a bone up for Russ to stand and reach for it, really cute when he does that as it's almost like he was walking on 2 legs. By 5pm it was starting to get dark, 545 and it was as if it was 8PM! Will surely take some time to get used to the longer night time. Hung around at home till about 7+ when we went to Tianyi Square, Ningbo's answer to Singapore's Marina Square. It even had a mini musical fountain and some really lovely decorations. We proceeded to Shipu Seafood Restaurant to eat our dinner. Huge place, 2 storeys, once entering staff were there to grete us and one staff member was assigned to take our orders. All the food available was displayed in the 'display' hall, All sorts of food, ranging form live mudfish to meat dishes were displayed. We just had to point out which ones we wanted to order. We chose about 10 dishes in all and it all cost just around 60 Singapore dollars! And it's not shoddy food they serve, it's real high quality and i enjoyed most of the food there.

Me and the two munchkins in the restaurant

After that we walked around for a bit and took pictures. Really nice night backdrop around there and the weather was fantastic. It's like when you were in a shop, it was hotter than it was outside the shop. When you stepped out of the shop, it was as if you were entering an air conditioned place, mighty wicked. On the down side though, were the beggars, they looked like 60+ish women who would persistently harass you for money. I was warned by a friend in SG about them and that most of them were fakers only wanting easy cash from foreigners. My family avoided them and shrugged them off. Pretty scary though those women, reminds me of rabid dogs running around haha.

Me and the kids in Tianyi Square

Went around the square and into a departmental complex. Stumbled upon a DVD/VCD/CD shop which sold english movies for cheap, original too! About 3-5 dollars per dvd! got Nacho Libre and Lucky Number Slevin while the family got Big Fish, Tokyo Drift, Legally Blonde, Rob-B-Hood. Went to get a chocolate sundae from mcdonalds and went back home.

Time : 10-ishPM

Went on the net and then watched tokyo drift with the kids until about 1+am. The terikayi boyz song came on and they rather enjoyed it. I didn't like it though, it's so annoying haha. We slept after that, zombified.