Yu Garden

      We walked around the Yu Garden Shopping Mall, seeing smoking ice cream drinks.  It’s all theatrics. Blue water with dry ice put in a big cup, nest a smaller cup with 2 inches of tea inside and stick a lid on top with soft serve ice cream.  So many food stores, but no meat on a stick or haw on a stick.  Tao reminded me it’s not haw season and we are too far south for them.
       We saw lots of traditional crafts like hand/finger painting, silk thread paintings, calligraphy several different ways, I like the dragon calligraphy turning your name into a dragon.  Some stores had supposed lowest prices, no bargaining sign on their doorways.
        I feel every food place sold crab.  Fried crab on a stick, crab dumplings, crab soup dumplings....We went into a few toy stores, still not what I’m looking for.  They might’ve held more official items due to the prices of Star Wars, Monchichis, Tottoro, lots of personal fans, Ultra Man, grown-up figurines(maybe they’re anime ones?), and Pokémon cards(but I could tell they were the fake ones).
         Wandering around the corrdoors we came to the Yu Garden.  I can’t remember if I was there before or not, I know I was outside of it for sure on the walkways over the water, I remember eating large soup dumplings outside in the sun.  Today we went in the garden and it was so beautiful, every building had a different roof, there were dragons, storks, warriors, tigers....  So many walk ways and little doorways to go through to other courtyards.  I took a ton of pictures here, I couldn’t resist.  People love feeding the giant coi.  The boys tried dipping their fingers in the water, but the fish were smarter, they knew it wasn’t food and didn’t even try to nibble on them.
         Never fun shopping with Tao, his shopping is walking past the store 10 feet from the door.  I like to window shop by walking though seeing what different stuff they have.
         For dinner we came back to the shopping mall with Tao’s parents and went to a huge food court.  You grab a tray, choose your food and then pay.  I choose a cold chicken dish, noodle dish and mochi pears filled with custard.  Some of the other things chosen were big soup dumplings, small soup dumplings, crab on a stick, and so proud my kids each picked out a veggie dish on their own!