Great time with friends and shopping at IKEA

In one week from today we will be moving into our house in Ranch Sante Fe (a nearby subdivision of homes rather than apartments) and also celebrating our 1 year anniversary here. I cannot believe it has gone this fast and how much this city has changed for us over the past year. Since our new home will be unfurnished we took a trip to get some mattresses and sofas ordered from IKEA. IKEA on a weekday is hard to get to due to traffic, but is usually not too crazy. IKEA on a Saturday is a different story. Traffic was great and I was hopeful the store would not be to bad. Dustin went on a Saturday once before we moved here and said literally there were so many people that you could only move as an entire group throughout the flow of the store. This is mostly due to the large group of people that come to sightsee rather than purchase. Thankfully, there were only a few hundred thousand in the store due to the holiday and people not returning to the city yet. They were still stopping in the middle of the asle taking pictures of each other like they were in Disneyland, but for the most part we got through to the check out with little headache.

The headache came when I went to get the kids some hotdogs from the restaurant in the store. They are inexpensive and a fair number of Chinese buy them too. That is where the headache came in. I went to get into line (always have to use that term loosely in China) and a grown man looked at me with Josh in the cart and Danny holding my hand and sprinted, I mean literally sprinted to get in front of me. Now this would not be such a big deal except the rest of the group he was with apparently do not sprint. One of course had no problem cutting right in front of me, and then there were the two ladies that decided that they needed to be so close to me it would have been considered indecent touching. She was of couse shouting up her order and handing money over the top of me. So needless to say, I was biting my tongue--okay, I was muttering under my breath or at least just muttering about the rudeness of people. We got to the table and ate and had Dustin go back and get the ice cream cones. He returned to tell me that someone actually backed into the line and stole an ice cream cone (they cost 1 yuan which is 15 cents). Pretty crazy stuff.

We got home and prepared for our friends from Germany to come over for dinner. There daughter Jule (prounced ula) is in Danny's class at school, and Monika is the other room/PTA mom with me. They also have a little boy Mathis that is just a little older than Josh. We had a really great time and it was the perfect ending to our crazy trip to IKEA. Next we will see how the delivery and set up company does--they are having to bring it one day and set it up the following day. Should be interesting.