My New Best Friends

I just realized I made a post about Beijing and failed to mention my new best friend who I met on Friday!!!! We went to the Pearl Market after seeing the Temple of Heaven and I spent the afternoon bartering on a number of things like a Chinese flag from a man that also makes stamps with your names on them. He asked me what my name was and I told him, but then said that all my friends call me Snacks and that in Chinese my name is "little eats" which I said in Chinese. He laughed and got excited and grabbed a pad of paper and wrote it out in Chinese and it was right, but I told him I didn't really want a stamp so I told him if I decided I did I would come back later for it. We then proceeded upstairs where I bought a pearl necklace and then up another floor where there were little shops with more pearls. We saw some beautiful pearls in one window and the girl came out to talk to us, so we asked to see those earrings, which were in white gold and were 450 yuan, which is about 60 dollars, so we asked to see what else she had. Vivyan and I ended up spending the next three hours talking to her, looking at necklaces and different settings and differently sized pearls and it was so much fun and I ended up spending abou 250 yuan on two necklaces and two pairs of earrings which I think we got good deals on. We loved her so much that I kept saying we were best friends and she kind of agreed, but at the end we bought her and the other three women in there ice cream from downstairs and out on the street and brought it back to them with three new customers from our group, Bea, Brooke, and Catie, and then they loved us even more, so I bought another necklace. I talked to the girl, Sarah, all about pearls and what the differences are and where they come from and how you can tell good pearls and asked her if we could come back and work there and they just laughed and said yes. Now I will go back there and get some more great pearls, and can get a good deal on them, so if anyone would like me to buy them some for a good price (about 5 dollars for a pearl set in sterling silver with a white gold covering and then another 5 for a chain - roughly 10 for a string), let me know the colors (white, black, pink) and what you want and I will go back and give my new friends some more business. It's probably my new favorite thing to do, buying pearls, so don't worry about asking me. I'll just give you the bill when I get home (hehe). I can't stop thinking of my own new pearls, so I am going to run, but I will be going back to my new friends at least two more times, probably. Aaand I might be working with them in the future and learning everything there is to know about pearls.