Shopping, eating, and shopping

On Friday night I went to Wanda Plaza and did a little shopping. I had to buy a new electric shaver, since my old one was dying. There were sparks coming out of the cord and a little smoke from the motor, so I really needed to get a new one. I also bought a new space heater for my bedroom. It's pretty nice and has a remote, so I can wake up in the morning and turn it on before actually getting out of bed.

On Saturday I went to lunch with Jessie to a little restaurant she found called Symphony, or something like that. It's billed as a French restaurant, but was more like an European restaurant. It was actually quite good! We started with a small dish that was sort of like Shepard's Pie with some cheese added on top. Then we had soup and a small salad. We ordered two entrees... roast chicken with herbs and seafood covered in cheese. They were both excellent. For dessert Jessie had the passion fruit mousse and I had some chocolate cheese cake. Yum yum!

It seems Saturday was a good day to eat a lot. That evening Reese and her family invited me out for hotpot. We went to a different place this time, and the pot that we cook in there was made of stone instead of the normal metal ones. I could not really taste the difference. We had sliced beef, sliced lamb, pork meatballs, fish, some little cigarette-shaped dumplings, small eggs (quail or pheasant... not sure which), pig's blood (gelatinous-like cubes), mushrooms, potatoes, and lotus root. It was very good but I ate too much as I usually do when I eat hotpot.

On Sunday I did a lot of laundry and played around on the computer during the day. In the evening I went to dinner with Sophia at noodle restaurant in Wanda Plaza. After dinner we did a little shopping at Ito Yokado. Sophia looked at boots and I bought a new iPhone 3GS. I didn't mess with the new phone when I got home since it was kind of late and I wanted to read the manual before playing around with it. Yeah, I'm one of those manual reading types of people.

The next day I read about how the iPhone works online, but when I tried to get it working I ran into some problems. Nothing's ever easy here. The iPhones purchased here in China are locked to China Unicom, and my phone account is with China Mobile. In order to unlock the iPhone I had to borrow a China Unicom sim chip from a friend and put that into my iPhone. When I hooked it up to my laptop and started ITunes then it was unlocked, so then I could take out the China Unicom sim chip and put in my China Mobile sim chip and continue with the registration process.

Now I need to get in touch with China Mobile and get the internet on my account turned on. I think I will wait until I get back from vacation in January to do that. Oh, I forgot to mention... I am going back to the U.S. for Christmas and New Years. It will be the first time in 5 years that I've been back there for Christmas and I am looking forward to going.