Malls are the same everywhere....

Sunday, June 27th

My first day driving alone and my first day dropping off Eli alone. I had requested the early shift because traffic is SO much lighter in the morning. The driving went well. The drop off did not. Eli hung onto me like a scared monkey. I wasn’t terribly surprised, as the entire morning up to that point had consisted of him explaining why he didn’t want to go. (“The kids don’t like me”—“No honey, they just don’t speak English”—“Yes they DO, they just don’t like me”). I finally had to ask them to pull him off me so I could leave (with sobbing in the background). So yeah, I’m doing pick-ups from now on! He doesn’t do that to Jason, much.

Eva hasn’t gotten out much so far, so we decided to do a family trip to the new Mall: City Mall. It was by far the most Western experience we’ve had thus far, and we’re in no hurry to repeat it. Other than the ubiquitous smoking, we could have been anywhere. The kids loved it—not because we bought things, but because there is Jingo’s Jungle on the top floor. We had heard about Jingo’s Jungle already (“Your kids will love it, you’ll hate it”). You load a card with a minimum of 5JD per kid and then they go on rides until they use up all the money. They could have stayed there—and spent lots of money—all day. Eva was in heaven, except for when we got her to go on the carousel with Eli. She rode an indoor roller coaster as well as one of those tower drop rides. The biggest problem was there wasn’t much they could go on together. We thought they could both go on a froggy ride, but Eli shrieked and held on for dear life the entire time. After that he was done! Eva was happy to use up the rest of the JDs on the card.

The last stop in the mall was the 2 story Carrefour supermarket. Honestly it was pretty overwhelming and we were glad to head home.