Monday 5/10/10

It is morning here in Guangzhou on Monday. Happy Mothers day to all of the mom's in the states! Hope you all had a great day! We are doing well overall! Yesterday we did some shopping for gifts and souvenirs in the morning along with the rest of our travel group. It is lots of fun seeing all of the families with their new children out and about. When you shop in this area it is expected that you will barter for the items you purchase. That's not necessarily the way I like to shop, but if you know what is expected, it can be kind of fun seeing how much they will lower their price. Our guides told us that the shop owners would not enjoy the transaction without some bartering. The kids all really had fun with the shopping---I have given each of them a small amount of money to spend in China. I won't disclose what they bought yesterday so they can keep it a surprise, but they were really pumped up at the bargains they got.

When we got back from shopping we went to a restaurant that came highly recommended by our guides. This restaurant was a favorite of the locals. Strangely, this was the first time we have been anywhere that we really didn't feel welcomed. Everywhere we go we get lots of looks and stares but people have been friendly. I think people in China are amazed that a family with 3 children would adopt another child. Anyhow, the staff at the restaurant seemed a little "put out" that we were there and were less than helpful in sorting through the menu selections. I wish I would have taken a picture of the menu. It had pictures of each dish and an English name in addition to the Chinese name. Some of the items were pretty scary! Items included sea cucumber, starfish, baby octopus---you get the idea! We tried to play it safe and ordered some roasted chicken, pork spare ribs and fried rice. They brought us out the chicken first. To our surprise the chicken was whole and hacked into several small pieces. Seeing the chicken's head on the plate and bones, guts and all roasted kind of diminished our appetites to say the least. Abigail seemed to enjoy it but the rest of us filled up on the other food. We probably won't go back to that restaurant!

Today we go back to the clinic to get Abigail's TB skin test read. It looks good, so we should still be on track. I got a call in the room around midnight last night because one of the mom's in our travel group had the stomach flu really bad. Her husband had been sick two days before with the same stuff. I hope that doesn't try and make its way through the group. I didn't have anything with me to give her to help, but there is a family here that has two nurses in it and they had told me earlier that they had brought some inject-able medicine for nausea in case anyone needed it. I called them and asked them to help out the gal who is so sick. Hopefully it helped! I'll check on her later this morning. On a humorous note, it will be kind of fun for me to tease the nurses today about me calling them in the night to wake them up for something instead of it being the other way around like it usually is when I am on call, with nurses calling me at night and waking me up!!

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is our consulate appointment for Abigail's visa. We spent an hour and a half yesterday afternoon getting paperwork ready for that. Our guides go to the appointment for us and we have to wait in our hotel room by the phone just in case there are any questions. On Wednesday we will then have another appointment at the consulate to finalize the visa and have an official family picture taken. The visa should be ready by 5pm on Thursday. When it is done, we will check out of the hotel and take a 3 hour bus ride to Hong Kong to spend the night there before flying out on Friday morning. That is what we are waiting for!!! Blessings to all of you today!!

P.S. - I posted a slide show of our visit to The Temple of Heaven in Beijing if you are interested.

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