Chaoyang Park (beware parents!!!)

(Written on 15 August)

I’m trying to make it a family affair every Saturday, with us going out as a family in the morning, and then bringing Nainai out together for dinner on that day. Last week was no exception as on 7 August, we went to Chaoyang Park. The last time we were there was in April, when it was cooler.

Thank goodness we were again blessed with cool weather (i.e. not overly sunny, and not humid, with some breeze), and there were not as many people as I expected on a weekend. Everytime I go there, I cringe at the exorbitant prices of the kiddy rides, and thanked my lucky stars Rosabelle was not old enough to request for (and whine) to sit on them.

This time round, even though being the good girl that she is, she did not clamour to sit on them, she did look longingly and said ‘要sit’, and being the ever-nice parents that we were, paid even more than we will usually do for rides in Singapore.

First off, the rocky horse that went all of two rounds (less than 2 minutes?), and every accompanying adult had to pay, so make that RMB20 for a lousy ride… I actually think her ride on the miniature horse was way more worth it… And then, we had to queue to get on the carousel, and this was even worse – RMB40 for both of us for less than 3 minutes! (That’s her eating her pear whilst waiting for Papa to pay through his teeth for the ride, and measuring herself up, haha…).
And then we got on the big horse… and before it started, Rosabelle decided she wanted to sit on the small horse, so we had to quickly shift, and I had to make do with the horse ‘saddle’ poking into the base of my spine... Less than half a revolution on, Rosabelle decided she does not like it and kept saying ‘下来，下来’… faint! So I had to distract her with Papa taking photos of us, with the other horses chasing after us, and with the reflections of us in the mirror.
I was so glad to get off, and we decided to not pay for such lousy rides anymore, but instead rented a bicycle (this RMB40/hour was more well-spent). Whilst Wayne was waiting for the bicycle at the kiosk (it’s in demand over the weekends), I brought Rosabelle alongside to wait and explored a new part of Chaoyang Park. It’s a tree-top adventure activity, and there were many other on-goings like fishing from an inflated pool as well.

Our girl obviously liked the steering wheel, and kept wanting to sit on Papa’s lap to steer and lean over the press the horn (but it kept interfering with Wayne’s braking and steering, of course).
Most of the times, she sat/stood in between us, and we went to many parts of the big park that we would never have explored ourselves on foot.
We also stopped at the Lego store, and this is Rosabelle’s attempts at taking a picture of Mummy (I seriously thought she did not press the button each time and only after scanning the pictures did I realize that she actually was successful in taking the photos, except that they were all so out of focus…):
Rosabelle then got increasingly finicky and wanted to get down, until I decided to strap her right in front of the bicycle (where there were straps for bags). It worked! She was happy as a lark and keeping quiet, busy looking around and enjoying the view/breeze from the front (maybe Wayne and I were both blocking her view/wind…). I even told her to wave at and say ‘hello!’ to people, getting a lot of friendly smiles and waves in return.
When the hour was up, we returned the bike and headed for Annie’s to eat lunch, where she enjoyed the grilled chicken salad (mainly the chicken and cherry tomatoes), salmon, baked cheese mushrooms, and pumpkin soup. It was close to 4:30pm by the time she took her afternoon nap that day, and she had a deep sleep for 2.5 hours, waking up only at 7pm, haha!

We quickly headed to Sanlitun Village for dinner – we parked at the Village North, wanting to check out the new shops, but it was very much a ghost town still with a lot of shops still unopened. We took a leisurely walk around The Opposite House hotel as well (we were last there in August 2008, where I still am in pain over the fact that I missed out on a free meal at Sureno restaurant, which is rather expensive and apparently serves great food with wonderful service to boot!). There was a sudden bout of rain, and we had to quickly walk back to the carpark and parked at the basement of The Asian Kitchen restaurant, our de facto place to have a meal.
Our girl ate quite a bit that day, and by the time we finished with dinner, it was still raining, so we couldn’t head out for some outdoor run-around. We instead went to the basement area, where our girl saw the 小白兔mural and proceeded to perform her act in front of it…
Saturdays are becoming a norm for late nights as we head back home close to 11pm, so you can imagine the amount of time it takes for her/us to settle in, wind down, bathe and sleep, phew!