The Trip to the Pearl Market

Today we had plans to pick up my friend Erin from the subway station and all go to the Pearl Market. The Pearl Market is a building with numerous shops of all sorts selling scarves, glasses, watches, sports jerseys, jewelry (hence the Pearl market name), cheap Chinese toys, etc. We each had certain things we were looking for while we were there, and we also planned to go out to lunch. I planned to accomplish this all and still get back by 2:30 to watch Danny swim in his class.

Unfortunately, the day did not start off well for our plans. The big problem was that while I had a map to show Tom the subway station we needed to pick up Erin at, it did not have many roads listed on it. I was able to get across to him the plan of picking her up and then going to the Pearl Market. Our mistake was in asking another driver in our parking lot how to get to the station. He sent us to the wrong station. In addition, the time it took us to ask him, left us behind our schedule from the beginning. We finally got to Erin and picked her up, but we lost about 40 minutes in the whole process.

We arrived at the market and we started our shopping. This is a little more work than back home, for two reasons. There are no price tags--you just have to barter and they are small shops and you sort of have to go from one to another to make sure you are getting a good deal. This of course all takes a lot of time. We were collectively able to each get some items that we either came there needing, or wanting. I was able to get some costumes for the boys to play in and a pair of sunglasses, Mom was able to get a lot of jewelry, and some soccer outfits for the boys, and Erin was also able to pick up some jewelry. However, this all took up the entire amount of time that we had before I needed to get back. So we scrapped the idea of lunch and had Tom take us to the closest McDonalds. We then ate in the car as we brought Erin back to the subway station.

After dropping her off and apologizing for the crazy morning and rushed lunch, we traveled as fast as we could back to the clubhouse. We got there about half way through Danny's swim class, but it did not seem to phase him too much. (I had been so worried that he would look out and not see us there watching him).

Overall, the day was insane and extremely stressful for me, but we got a lot of the things we had wanted to get at the market. (I failed to mention that Josh was with us the whole day--poor guy was a saint because he was in the stroller all morning, then did not get lunch until late. It was also crazy because of the constant negotiating for the price, at the end you just wish they would give you a fair price and allow you to pay it. While you may get a good deal negotiating, I always feel like this is probably not the case, as you have no concept of what it cost them in comparison to what they are saying is their lowest or "best" price.)