Shopping & Eating

As a group, we hired a bus to take us shopping for pearls. I was able to buy a lovely necklace for my daughter. I watched them string the pearls right in front of me. We will give this to her on her 15th birthday I think.

We finished up our shopping quickly and the bus was not going to return for another hour or so. Since it was nearing lunchtime, we decided to get a bite to eat. AR saw a McDonald's on the corner and it was like a beacon pulling us in.

The McDonald's was a three floor restaurant. We went to the second floor and waited on line like everyone else. A manager came over to us and asked us to sit down. In fact, they asked people who were eating to move over so that we could sit and eat there and they did!

The manager sent an employee over to take our order. Everyone orders the same way. They are given a plastic laminated menu and they point to the picture of what they want (locals too, not just us foreigners), so we did the same. They took our money, brought us our change and then our food.

We were pretty puzzled as to why we were being treated like royalty. Others in our group went to the same McDonald's and they were not treated the same way, so we don't know why we were treated so special. I made a bottle for Katrina and she gulped it down quickly. Then she ate some french fries!

Later at night AR went down to the medical clinic too. He came back with all kinds of medicine, including a similar looking herbal tincture. After he tasted that he said he knew why Katrina was screaming when we squirted the medicine in her mouth. It tasted awful!

Since two of the three of us were sick, we decided to eat in the hotel restaurant this evening. Katrina kept dropping food on the floor and the waiters kept running over to pick up the food. I had to drop off some paperwork in our travel coordinator's room tonight. We were getting Katrina's visa photo and medical exam in the morning.