Shanghai

Last weekend our family went to Shanghai!  We had a great trip, the girls traveled so well, and we had many meaningful connections with friends.  Even though it was a really quick trip, I am so thankful we went.  The main purpose of our trip was to go to the wedding of our friend Steven Ma and his wife Jackie.  We knew Steven from the Chinese Fellowship we went to when we lived in Southern California.  Steven now lives and works in Pasadena, although he is originally from Shanghai, so he flew back for his wedding, and now his wife will move to the States.

The wedding was amazing and the food was incredible!  We had lobster, fish, crab, scallops, huge oysters, ham, chicken, duck, and beef and that was just 1/3 of the dishes.  Steven's parents were very kind and came to our table a couple times to make sure we were well.  They also gave a traditional red envelope to each of our girls with money inside.  Also, Steven, even though he was the busy groom, stopped at our table several times to visit and he even brought us a bag with food from the States that he had brought to us!  Wow, it was so kind of him to be thinking of us and yet it was his wedding day.  Here is a photo from the wedding.

On our trip we also visited our friends Keith and Julie Winslow and their 3 kids Josiah, Caleb, and Hannah.  It was great to see their home and neighborhood and get a better feel for their life and work.  Josiah and Sophia are both 4 so they had a lot of fun playing together.  Keith and Julie both speak Chinese and they want their kids to speak Chinese, so they're doing this really cool thing where Julie only speaks English to the kids so they will learn English, and Keith only speaks Chinese to the kids so they will learn Chinese.  It was amazing to hear the boys speaking both languages so well!  I was really impressed and hopeful that someday our girls will be bilingual too.  They treated us to a delicious meal and then we had homemade cherry cobbler back at their home.  Unfortunately, I totally forgot to take a photo of their family.  : (

The last friend we visited in Shanghai is a dear friend named Liu Jing or Joshua.  Adam and he call each other "brother."  We met him in 2004 when we first moved to China and he's been a dear friend ever since.  He now works in Shanghai for a foreign company.  Together we took the girls to a fun indoor play place, enjoyed a delicious lunch followed by Dairy Queen.  We then took our afternoon naps in the taxi on our way to a cool neighborhood in Shanghai that has the old style homes from 100 years ago.  The people still live on top of the buildings, but in the bottoms of the buildings are really cool shops and cafes. 

Adam & Joshua

We ate a late lunch and so we were the last ones in the restaurant from the lunch crowd.  The waitresses and  cooks all gathered around to see our girls.  I counted 15 of them gathered around Sophia discussing her eye color and admiring our sweet little joy-bringer.  Here's a photo.