Hear, See, Speak No Shopping

We have seen the most amazing assortment of cool boots here. Hannah and I were interested in having a pair, so one day, my dad, Hannah, and I went out on a shopping trip to find some. Note to self: foreign money spends faster than American currency! Along the way, we did some sightseeing. We saw the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower in the center of this, the former imperial city of China. It was so cold outside that we decided to stop along the way for hot drinks to warm us up. We stopped at... guess where?!? Starbucks! On the way out, we decided to sip on our drinks while sitting on a bench outside of Starbucks. Merriella decided to say, "nee how" to a Chinese woman. Thinking that Merriella spoke Chinese she attempted to carry on a conversation with her. My dad rushed to the rescue explaining to the woman that Merriella didn't understand. In a short moment, we had a gathering of over two dozen people who were curious about a number of things including: 4 westerners with a chinese girl; the man with three daughters(!); which region of China Merriella was from; and what brought us to China. The crowd kept getting bigger and before long, people were questioning if I was the mother or if my grandma was. Dad's 10 chinese words were of little use since 5 of them are hello, airplane, thank-you, yes and no. After finding a woman that spoke both English and Chinese, we were able to convey to them why we were in China. Many of them were perplexed. The Chinese are more likely to stare, come very close and ask direct questions than Americans. All in all, it was an amusing thing to see a family of Americans trying to communicate with a woman who only spoke Chinese! What a sight!
Nana had the experience of a lifetime as well, when on the way back to our hotel she attempted to tell a chinese taxi driver who spoke no english how to get around in his home town. Dad also had a conversation in the pool hot tub with a Chinese man who was attempting to give him Chinese speech lessons! With every attempt my dad made to fix his grammatical errors, the man just spoke louder, more dramatically, and further inside dad's personal bubble! That went splendidly! Did you know that a chinese word has 4 different meanings depending on the tonal inflection? One word in particular might be "mother" or "horse"!
Only a few of our many adventures have been recorded thus far, some of them will have to be told in person when we get back home!