Happy Birthday

23. April 2008 by ilanamong.

Happy Birthday Ilana! Yesterday was my birthday. I opened my big present from Alex (my brother) first thing in the morning. It was a really cool 2008 Olympics backpack with one of the Olympic characters on it.

My dad had to stay at the conference until 5:30 pm, so we asked Monica if she wanted to go around with us. Again we went to the shopping district and Tian’anman square. It was pretty much the same thing as last time at the square except more crowds–lots, and lots of people everywhere. Everybody was taking pictures of me and wanted me in their pictures because they’ve never seen anyone with blond hair. I thought it was pretty odd when somebody asked my mom if we wanted to go to the museum with him–we didn’t go.

At lunch time, we found a little dumpling house that was a small little room on a side street. The entire menu was in Chinese and the man only spoke a few words of English. This was definitely not a tourist restaurant. Luckily my dad printed out cards that have the symbols for foods like chicken, beef, and fish. My mom pointed to the chicken, he nodded his head no. She pointed to the beef and he said beef dumplings. My mom said yes and ordered 2 plates. We had no way of knowing how many dumplings come in two orders, so we ended up with an estimate of 25 dumplings on each plate. That’s a lot of dumplings! We must have been hungry because we ate all but three of them. Alex only ate one, I ate about six, and Monica and my mom ate the rest. Later we were glad we got there so early because the place was piling up with buisness men on their lunch break.

Later, Alex got hungry so we took him out to a little outside marketplace. Luckily there are no bugs flying around in China. He got a plate with six pieces of ham on it. My Mom had a beer and I had a soda. We went home and went to sleep–we ended up sleeping 14 hours! Unfortunately, we all slept through my birthday dinner, so we’re going to have my dinner tonight.

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