Lost

Here's a story for you. It's a good one. So Mark is still in Beijing and we want to get out of the house. We drive to a shopping center and walk around and get ice cream from Burger King (we are still American after all). It's about 8:00 pm so we start heading to the car. I can't find my car. There are 3 levels of parking garages in this shopping center so me and the kids walk around each level twice. I'm pointing my car remote up in the air and hitting the alarm button over and over. Nothing.

Finally I ask a security guard to help us, he walks through the 3 levels with us again. Nothing. So either my car has been stolen or I'm in the wrong parking garage. The security guard is asking me things like "do you remember going up when you arrived?"; "what did you see when you got out of your car?". It all looked the same to me. I could not remember any details (which is not like me). But Asian malls are very different from American ones. They all "glomb" together and run into each other and you switch buildings and you don't even know it.

We finally went to another parking garage and found the car. Yeah! The children all had flip flops on because I told them we really wouldn't be walking much. We walked around from 8:00 - 9:00. The kids were troopers although they started to complain that their feet hurt so they all took off their flip flops and walked around barefoot. We went up and down escalators, in and out of 3 parking garages, and we were tired. Maren really wanted to get a taxi and just go home, but I told her we needed to find our car. We said a prayer, but like sometimes, it wasn't answered immediately. It was 30 minutes later. But it was answered eventually.

Then I got lost driving home and had to reset my GPS 5 times. What a night! The kids finally got to bed at 10:00 and Mark got home from China at 11:30 - he missed all of the fun! :-)