Houhai

For lunch today we went to Grandma's Kitchen, a restaurant that serves American food. It's a bit pricey for food in China, but reasonable for western food I guess. I stuffed myself on pancakes and a chocolate-mint shake. Yummy!

Afterwards we went off to Houhai to go skating on the frozen lake. After an odd, unplanned, car tour of the hutongs, we finally arrived at the lake. A bunch of independent skate rental places exist on the lake, but those were some of the shoddiest skates I have ever seen in my life. We decided to walk on the ice (I've violated the don't-walk-on-frozen-lakes rule with reckless abandon lately) to the Lotus Lane area since Marie had seen better rental places in that area. This turned out to be a great decision since we found bicycle-skates (? I have no idea what to call them) for rent. They sort of look like regular bicycles but instead of a front tire, you have a blade to control your direction. You don't get much traction so a lot of the time you're just skidding on the ice dodging skaters and people 'skating' on chairs. The lack of control just adds to the excitement. ;)

After an hour of that we found one of the bar/cafe places along the lake to have hot chocolate. I really haven't been to Houhai very often and it's too bad since aside from Lotus Lane, it's actually quite charming. Lotus Lane is way overpriced since it's directed towards foreigners. However, there is a cafe there which has pretty good smoothies. Amazingly the smoothies there are smaller and more expensive than Jamba Juice. I miss Jamba Juice.