We got distracted by shopping on our way to the subway station. We don’t really need anything but after wearing the same two pairs of shoes for 6 months now, Nick flirted with the idea of replacing some. We’ve walked so many miles in our sneakers that the rubber is starting to wear down.

It’s a different experience to shop for new things when you have a “one in one out” policy. Which pair of shoes will these replace? Do we really need them? We walked away empty handed after much hemming and hawing.

Millie had better luck in Mini-so, which is a temple of consumerism and crap. It is truly a store of buying things for buying sake. Endless plastic keychains, collectible dolls, glitter pens, etc.

She has had a tough couple of days, I think because she is really missing her best friend Louise. This comes out in little outbursts directed at us. This morning she told us “all you do is tell me what to do all day” — which is quite accurate. We do a lot of “don’t touch that” and “careful of the bicycle speeding towards you” and “we’re going here now”. As an attempt to help, we have been looking for little places to give her some autonomy and control. In miniso we told her she could get one thing, whatever she wanted.

She chose a stuffed animal of the character Judy from Zootopia. So now she has two favorite dolls named Judy, which is very confusing. She carried New Judy around all day narrating the world to her.

We took the subway one stop to the Natural History Museum. It was very busy and none of us were really feeling it. Like elsewhere in China there was heavy crowd control, which just makes you feel like cattle.

Nick and I discussed how spoiled we are by being to the incredible museum of natural history in London, and that we’ve seen so many of the taxidermied animals in real life this year. We did have a good laugh at how bad some of the taxidermy was.

From here we started getting hungry and walked to Lailai Xiao Long Bao, which was a recommendation from my friend Soya (hi Soya!). Like yesterday I was surprised by how European Shanghai looks and feels.

There was a line out the door but it moved quickly and we got a table. We ordered way too much: Chinese broccoli (vegetables!!), wonton soup, and a bunch of different soup dumplings: truffle and pork, regular pork, crab, mushroom. They were SO good and a great last big meal in China. Adding to my list to learn to make at home: wontons. Once I’ve perfected those then maaaaybe I will attempt a soup dumpling.

We took the subway back and exited into a mall. We saw a crocs store and let Millie choose a commemorative jibbit to remember China. People here take crocs very seriously.

We got lost and couldn’t figure out how to exit the mall. This has happened to us so many times. I did not predict how much time I’d spend being lost in a mall on this trip.

After some playtime and reading at home, we decided to head out again for one last hurrah. We stopped at a corner place that seemed busy and ordered various meat skewers. Millie looked at the guy with bleached hair and his friends and said “wow that table over there is full of cool guys.”

We had a great time people watching and then came home for bed.

Two inane observations about China that we’ve had:

1. There is a commonly used filler word in Chinese that sounds like the N-word. We hear it constantly. At first it was so jarring for us but now it has become the funniest thing to us. Every time we hear it we look at each other and pretend to scold the person, like “oh my god it’s 2025 you cannot say that!!”
2. Everywhere in the world people wear Yankees and dodgers hats and that is the same here. But there are also sooooo many hats that just say “Colorado” in a collegiate font. Why?!