Monday 23 March 2009

Indulgence

Yesterday, we went to Chonqing Road, the Changchun variant of the Avenue Louise in Brussels. This area is popular for shopping, but it seems to me that it's more the richer part of the people in Changchun who do their shopping here. The street literally begins at the Changchun Shangri-La Hotel. This is usually where we ask the taxi driver to take us, because whichever way we try to say 'Chonqing-lu', we never seem to pronounce it correctly enough for the taxi driver to understand. Starting from the Shangri-La Hotel and ending near the Banrou Temple all the way at the other end of the road (the picture of me and Auro in his stroller was taken in front of the temple walls), there are lots of big department stores as well as smaller shops, cinemas and food stalls.
Our goal yesterday was to buy a small food processor to help me make Auro's fruit and vegetable purees. (The past couple of days I've been pureeing his apples and pears by hand , which works too, but with a blender I can make bigger portions and freeze them!) However, before going to the baby shop (where we also bought the stroller before) , we first went to eat in one of the (as far as I know) only two Pizza Hut's in Changchun, right accross from the Shangri-La. Especially Remo, having some pride left as an Italian, would normally never step into a Pizza Hut, but since there are no other restaurants here that serve pizza, we have been forced to reconsider our 'standards' and have actually become real Pizza Hut regulars: about once every other week we go downtown and treat ourselves to (what we now consider to be) delicious pizza!!
So, after our little indulgence at the Pizza Hut, we walked to the baby shop where we were (as usual) warmly greeted by the whole staff, who , as soon as we had entered, moved all their attention to Auro and surrounded his stroller 'en masse' to talk to him, to touch his cheecks and to (yes!) rearrange his clothes. For some reason mama never dresses her baby properly: when his cap is on, it needs to come off and when he is not wearing it, it is neatly put on again... Anyway, we got the baby food processor, some extra bibs (it's amazing how so little food can make such a mess) and 2 ready-made baby purees for Auro to try (might be handy when we travel, so we need to find out which ones he likes).
By the time we were home again, it was dinner time for Auro, so we tried one of the jars of baby food. The pumpkin-puree looked quite good, but the taste (I tried it) wasn't all that great. Auro ate some of it, but I don't think he'll ever be a big fan. It nevertheless resulted in a very 'colourful' picture!

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