Snow and 19 degrees---MIke

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Morning

So, we had big plans for this morning. We were gonna go see a bunch of sights, and buy a few things, and revisit one of the apartments to make sure it was what we thought it was. However, we found that snow was falling, and starting to stick. Now, normally, snow is no big deal to us. We’ve dealt with it before, and we usually handle it like old pros. But it turns out that when snow falls on marble (did I mention that they use marble for everything?), it turns slick. Really slick. Unsafe slick in the shoes we were in. But, we battled on, and got onto the subway for our big day. Now, it turns out that when you’re doing something for the first time, it takes a LOT longer to do it than you thought it would, and it’s frustrating to boot, because the little things just don’t go right (you don’t know exactly where to go, so you end up going in circles looking for something, for example). So, to cope, we decided to do one thing at a time, and then return to the hotel for a break, and then head out again for the next thing. This meant that we would only accomplish about a third of what we wanted to accomplish, but it also ensured that we didn’t kill each other by the end of the day. All good. J  So, after the apartment visit, our next trip was to lunch. We found in the basement of our hotel a large shopping mall, and it has a large eating alley called “Gourmet Street.” Now, the “Gourmet” is misleading, because it’s all fast food-ish, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. For about $3 each, we ended up with dishes that were larger than we could eat. They were bowls of rice with some meat-vegetable-sauce type stuff on top—nothing but good! And there are about fifty of these places down there, so we won’t run out of food to try any time soon.

Afternoon

We went  . . . to Wal-mart. That’s right. We flew halfway around the world, and went to Wal-mart. Now, the rest of the story is that we (read that as “I”) forgot the cord that goes from the computer to the TV, so we wanted to find one of those. We also realized that we could get some water for a cheap price, and perhaps a few other things. So, another four stops east on Line 1, and then two stops south on Line 2, brought us to our destination. It’s a multi-level store, very crowded, and is almost nothing like the Wal-marts in the States. I mean, you can get many, many of the same things as you can back home, but they are all different because they are all locally made. We struck out on the cord (lots of new gadgets, but very few accessories), but found the water and some milk for Tracy’s hot chocolate. We came back and decided to eat dinner at the Italian restaurant on the second floor of the hotel—pretty good, but not great (overpriced, really). After dinner, we went down to the pool, and went for a swim. If you haven’t already, google pictures of the pool—something to behold. Then, it was off to bed.