Happy New Year!
Can you believe it? It’s already 2011! We have already finished the first decade of the new millennium. It’s insane how fast the time goes these days!
Have you made any resolutions? I honestly can’t remember what resolutions I made last year. Oops. While I’m not a huge fan of making resolutions (kind of seems like you’re setting yourself up for failure), I do have a couple for 2011:
1. Devote myself to learning Chinese, including reading and writing characters
2. Better time management (this one always eludes me!)
3. Make Shanghai friends (I hate making new friends! I miss my friends back home.)
4. Get to really know the city, other than shopping malls.
What did you do for NYE? I know some of you went out and rang in the new year in style (a little birdie named Facebook told me 
). It was really super duper cold here so M and I opted to stay in and watch movies instead. We had plans to go out but the cold, the strong winds, and lack of cabs just made going out really unappealing.
We celebrated NYE with M’s mom and my cousin S, and ate a hot pot dinner at Hai Di Lao. It’s a ginormous 2-story hot pot restaurant that can probably seat 450+ guests. Because they don’t take reservations, there’s always a ton of people waiting to be seated. Being such a large place, the restaurant offers many amenities, some very odd and funny ones, to the waiting guests.
The restaurant offers manicures, hand massages, glasses cleaning, and shoe shining for waiting guests. All these people were waiting to get hand massages.
The World of Warcraft room. That's right, you can play WoW while you wait for your table!
Hot pot! We did half-half, with a spicy broth and a milder seafood broth.
It's a very service-oriented restaurant, and offers all guests aprons to wear to protect from spatters.
S enjoying the hot pot.
Noodle show: If you order noodles for your hot pot, a guy in a white Adidas-like tracksuit comes to your table and does a noodle dance. He swings around the noodle in the air and dances around with it, and then sticks it in your hot pot. Hopefully, it doesn't touch the floor during the noodle dance.
On New Year’s day, we wandered around our neighborhood and ran some errands. While on Hong Mei Lu, we passed by the biggest bunny EVER.
The biggest bunny EVER. Big boy looked like he was 20 lbs or so. He made Bob look really svelte.
2010 was a very eventful year, to say the least. Here are some final shots from 2010.
For some reason, Lamb really likes to sleep on your head. I think it's because he likes to bite your hair when he gets hungry in the morning.
Lamb and Bob: Hopefully, 2011 will be the year where they learn to be friends. Their relationship has been quite tenuous until now, but we're crossing our fingers that they'll learn to get along.
Lamb likes to hang out on the warmest tile in the kitchen while I cook. (We have heated floors).
The fashion sense in Shanghai still leaves much to be desired. This man, in head to toe leather plus white socks, might take the prize on the what not to wear competition.
We wish you the best for 2011 with much love, happiness and blessings. Happy New Year!
