Day 43 in Beijing

27th December 2009, Sunday, the first day mum's here with me in China.

We (Anson's mum, Anson and me) all thought mum would be pretty tired from the flight and didn't expect her to get up till lunch. But seriously, mum is just so excited and energetic, my god, she starting talking to me and trying to wake me up since like 8am. Eventually she abandoned me in the room and went out to talk to aunty for the whole morning. Anson and I are still pretty much dead asleep when they are already preparing breakfast. My god.

Breakfast was awesome! Exactly what I love! Milk and steam buns~! Wakaka, so good~! The steam buns are without any fillings, just a bun, and it was made by a company that's really famous in Beijing, a lot of families will line up for it (according to aunty's experience). Aunty knows that my mum loves buns so she went and got these for mum. So nice ~

Today aunty will take us to one of her favourite shopping centres and we'll have lunch there. The shopping centre is called Chengxiang, outside of the Gongzhufen subway station. It's one of the bigger ones in Beijing selling all sorts of products and you can spend the whole day there without getting bored. Aunty and mum picked a Sichuan style restaurant inside Chengxiang and it was so funny that Anson and I got really worried about our rice not coming again. Yesterday's experience really gave us a bad impact huh? How can rice be difficult to get in China? Must be because of our duck fight yesterday with the managers that made our rice order extremely hard >_<


After lunch it'll be my responsibility in taking mum around the shopping centres while aunty and Anson go visit Anson's granddad. I kept on telling mum all these little tips about living in Beijing but I bet she didn't even pay attention to me because she's so focused on shopping.I had to constantly remind her to watch out for cars, not to buy street food, and the most important thing, must bargain when she wants to buy something! I made a good example for mum I think =P We saw this pair of pants on sale for 180RMB and to be honest, it was already a fairly good price for NZ standard. However, I kept mum away from talking to the lady directly so she doesn't express interest, and then I demonstrated my bargaining skills. Eventually after some chit-chat, and walking away etc, we finally got the pair of pants for 120RMB. It's formal wear, black long pants for 120RMB, we all think it's really good =)

Eventually we went home with loads of shopping bag and food. Mum's favourite food was actually corns! I can't believe this. This is something she said she really miss about China, the Chinese corns. Why do I call it the Chinese corns? eeek, it's actually very different to the corns we have in NZ. I don't remember the Chinese corns at all, but I love the NZ ones, sweet and juicy, bright yellow corn, I love it. But the Chinese one is very light coloured with less moist but more starch texture, not sweet at all, but just very chewy. Mum really love this type of corn, she said it's more chewy, have more texture while eating it and won't get sick of the sweetness like the ones in NZ. Eek.