Stuff from August

Here are a bunch of random pictures from August!

First, about a day after we got to Macau, our neighbors from Murray came over too on their last day of a three week romp through China. Me and the kids met up with them at a fancy sit-down restaurant called Pizza Hut. This is my only picture to document the night:

This is a screenshot of my phone map helping me find them:

I haven't figured out how to get everything in English instead of Chinese. Gotta work on that. BTW Chad works right by the circle you see towards the right, above Lago Nam Van.

I bought the girls necklaces to hold their bus passes. They were pretty excited about this. We've really got the bus thing down, at least the ones on main routes, and I always feel really proud of Jozie and Haven when we ride the bus. They get on together ahead of me (then I come behind with the stroller) and swipe their cards and find seats without my help. Then they proceed to annoy the heck out of everybody by singing loudly and playing and yelling questions to me from across the bus. I couldn't be prouder, for real.

We visited our usual parks after getting back to Macau. This first picture is at Flower City Park (the one Haven lovingly calls the "slippery slides park"). And yes that is Claire climbing up the slide at nine months old! Seriously she climbs up slides now.

Here's the cute front side of her:

And the other two cuties:

Here are just some fun signs I've passed by in the last month. This first one reminded me of my Alma Mater:

There are many varieties of this one all over Macau. Everybody in Macau deals with how to translate this in different ways.

I only get to have fun with translations by saying that for sure, Macanese people's English is MUCH MUCH MUCH (100x) better than my Cantonese (Macanese is what people native to Macau are called). This hair salon sign was pretty cool, though I still don't know what some of these things are (click on it to make it larger):

I liked that this sign told me I could "eat more, gain more!" (gain more coupons...)

Here are Haven and Jozie at one of our favorite restaurants (called May Box). They always get the spaghetti, which is spaghetti noodles with lots of cheese on top and then baked. It really is pretty good! At restaurants, I've found it's best to point right at the menu and underline the Chinese and English with my finger. I go ahead and just order everything for me and the girls and then if they really like something we order a second round of that. So far we get a lot of soup and then pull out the ramen noodles for them to eat, or we get plain bowls of rice. The thing I got at this restaurant was Pepper Steak and wow oh wow it was really really spicy!!! An interesting thing about restaurants is that if you ask for a glass of water, first it's usually considered kind of weird, but second it's brought to you warm, even if you ask for it cold. They're not used to anybody wanting to drink plain old cold water.

Here's super awesome Claire at the Park n' Shop grocery store. What a great third child she is. She lets us cart her around and takes naps when she needs them. And yep those are Sun Chips and Oreos you see - at a pretty high price but they're here!

This last picture is actually of the large metal can at the end of this street. August was the month of the ghosts and the city put cans like this out all over town. People bought rolled up paper and burned that and other items in order to appease the ghosts and keep them away.

Cool stuff!