Ice Parties

Headed off the City Centre this afternoon for a little bit a retail therapy and saw something interesting while we were there.

The central part of the mall is built around the ice-skating rink and when we first arrived we saw three huge bags of balloons hanging from the roof. So naturally the thought would be that something big was going to happen. Not yet though, so we continued on our walked up and down floors and in and out of shops.

Later when we walked back past the middle we saw they had set up the rink with more balloons and put a carpet over the middle. As we watched we saw a HUGE birthday cake carried out to the middle on a table and few guys wandered around with movie cameras. Ok so there was going to be a huge birthday party on the rink? Didn’t know you could hire it out for parties since it is in such a public space, but apparently you can.

So anyway along with many others, I stood and watched (haven’t quite got the hang of lining up the panorama images on the phone’s camera yet, but you get the idea). Now my guess is that there were about 10-15 children in the middle of the rink for about a total of 15 minutes. The music at the centre was turned off as a microphone was handed around the kids and their minders to sing happy birthday (very badly and very loudly). I should also say that none of the children at the party were actually ice skating, but rather just standing around on the carpet in the middle of the rink with 100’s of onlookers.

I find all this just weird and we didn’t actually stand around to watch the huge bags of balloons dropped from the roof. Extravagance is pretty normal for children here, and it seems that parents like to try to outdo each other when it comes to this type of thing. I must say though I think this is one of the strangest and most conspicuous ones I have seen.