We made it to Guangzhou

As you in the states are getting up for your Friday, we are heading to bed on Friday here in China. We flew in to Guangzhou this afternoon. All of us and our luggage made it without a hitch. Air pollution is really a problem in all of the cities we have seen. We must have reached 30,000 feet in the plane before breaking out of the smog today(Sad!). The weather here is much more humid and temperature is about 80 degrees. We'll definitely put our shorts and short sleeve shirts to good use for this leg of our trip. We are about 20-30 miles from the ocean, things are really green here. There are mountains around us and palm trees along the roads. We saw rice fields as the plane was coming in to land. The city is the smallest we have stayed in yet, only 6 million. It is much more congested with traffic and buildings than Hebei was. Many of the apartment buildings have gardens and small trees growing on top of them. Today must have been laundry day because most of the buildings we passed had laundry hanging out of their windows. With the humidity here I am sure getting stuff dry is an issue. I'm too tired to post a slide show at this time, but we did take some pictures that we will share as time and energy allows.

Today we all must have pooped out at the same time because we were all pretty cranky before getting settled in to our hotel tonight. We did have a small but precious gift today------our hotel is right next to a Pizza Hut and KFC. We also were told Starbucks is 3-4 blocks away. We're gonna make it now!!!! We actually did eat at Pizza Hut tonight and that brightened everyone's day. Pan pizza is pan pizza in China. I forgot how good cheese tastes. The menu had all kinds of other stuff besides Pizza. No breadsticks, No pasta, but lots of Chinese style dishes along with Chinese style pizza and of course the usual pizza we all love.

Abigail is bonding well with us at this point. She does become pretty frustrated when we can't understand what she needs. We're learning and she is learning. She's not hard to love at all, but it is kind of frustrating when we can't communicate well. On a more humorous note, today she started showing off some kung fu type kicks and karate chops and was saying "Hi Yah!!" Haven't figured out what that means yet but that will give us something to work on tomorrow. She says "Hi Yah!!" just like you would see in the movies as a karate fighter attacks. Pretty funny to watch and she can see it tickles us. The boys better be careful or she might just karate chop them!!

Tomorrow (Saturday) Abigail has a medical exam which is required as part of application for her US visa. Pray for the rest of the families in our travel group. Because of the holiday last weekend and the four day work week, some were not able to get their child's passport on time to get here today as scheduled. Some won't get in until about midnight tonight because you can't leave the province your child is from until you have a passport. We are continuing to be blessed and are on schedule for making all of our appointments this week.

Blessings,

John, Dana, and the kids