Today was a long day for Charlotte and me.

In the morning we got ready, then took the Zhangjiang Loop Line to Zhangjiang metro station, took the subway to Nanjing East Road (Jodi still calls is Henan Middle Road, cute), and then the 66 to Fuyou Road. Fuyou Road is one of the stops on the edge of... Cheng Huang Miao, the City God's Temple. I love this area because it has loads of antiques (real and fake), souvenir shops, wholesale malls, tourists, snacks... We browsed an old bookstall with antique blocks of wooden movable type for sale, ate Ningbo tangyuan (rice balls with black sesame amaretto paste inside, in soup) and Cheerios, watched the fish in the pond fight over bread crumbs, saw a strange heron-like bird under the Yu Garden crooked bridge, heard a mini-concert by a man playing the bamboo flute, watched a shadow play narrated by a guy dressed in period costume and featuring Zhu Ba Jie eating KFC, and flew through the throngs of tourists to catch a bus at Xin Bei Men.

The bus we caught was the 64, which took us to the Xinzha Road metro station. Originally I had wanted to stop at the Cyber Electronic Components Market to look at resistors and LEDs, but we didn't have time and as we rode past it looked like it was closed for National Day anyways. By that time, also, Charlotte had fallen asleep in my arms on the bus because it was about 12:30am, time for her afternoon nap.

She woke up when we were most of the way to John B's house, a good 15-minute walk from the Zhongshan Park metro station. Once there we got to play with little Willy (not so little anymore!) and chat with John B, Kexia, Adam and Megan, over three ginormous (Firefox spell-checker says that's a word‽) Papa John pizzas. After a few hours Charlotte started suffering the effect of her short and tortured lap-stroller nap, getting into trouble and throwing tantrums so we said goodbye and took Line 2 back to ol' Zhangjiang, shared a yogurt from the new Boli Nuchang at the metro station, and took the Loop Line home, where I ate dinner and fell so deeply asleep on the couch that Jodi didn't even wake me up to give Charlotte a bath.

It was a long but good day.