Today we traveled from Nanchang to Guangzhou for the final leg of our journey. The American consulate is here and that is where we will receive Alicia's visa and get permission to bring her back to the US. We left our hotel this morning at 11am and got to the White Swan hotel at about 4pm. We just went to dinner and are all very exhausted. We are up early tomorrow for another tour, so we are headed to bed. I will try and send some photos tomorrow.
Love to Marcus!!
Have a great day.
Paula
April 1 --
Hello Everyone,
Today is Sunday April 1 and we made it to Guangzhou. The famous White Swan hotel on Shamian Island will be our home for the next 4 days. Our flight from Nanchang was a little over an hour yesterday, but seemed to wear everyone out. That is not a good sign when the prospect of our 20 flight is only days away. Alicia is such a good trooper though……she literally fell asleep from the time that it took us to give our boarding pass to entering the airplane and then slept for about ¾ of the flight. Guangzhou is a beautiful city!! Very tropical feeling and very clean. The population of the city is about 10 million and most of the buildings are quite new and very nice. It amazes me that no matter the “niceness” of the building there is still laundry hanging from every window. Since there are no clothes dryers here, it’s the most efficient way to dry your clothes, plus it doubles as an extra closet. And after hanging our socks and undies in the bathroom for days before they were finally dry I can see why hanging them outside helps.
We ventured out for dinner last night with some other people in our group. The island is very nice and quite populated with tourists and adopting families, so everything is very “Americanized”. We went to a Cantonese restaurant across the street and it was wonderful. We didn’t get that adventurous in our meal selections though. When you walk in the door of the restaurant they have bins and tanks with all the “fresh” meal items like…….silkworms, water beetles, different fish types, turtles……all kinds of really great stuff!! We all agreed that if we didn’t know what it was, we may actually like some of those selections.
This morning we had a tour and we went to a Buddhist Temple and we lit our incense and made our wishes to the Buddha and then we had the children blessed by the monk in the temple with the Past, Present, and Future Buddha’s. Then we went to a museum that had ivory carvings, artwork, silk embroidery…..everything was quite beautiful, including the buildings themselves. Then we got to go to the Jade Factory!! There were such nice things there and we bought a few things for Alicia for when she gets a little older.
I think that we will be going out tonight for dinner with some people in our group and hopefully this afternoon we will take a walk and do a little shopping. There are a ton of little stores on the island that have some really cute stuff. We have to get Alicia a traditional outfit for her “Red Couch” picture with the other kids in the group.
We just returned from dinner. We went to Lucy’s tonight…….a totally western restaurant. Paul and I each had a cheese burger and fries and it tasted wonderful!!! I have been craving red meat for the last couple of days. The food here is really weird in that it’s either really spicy or has no flavor, nothing in between.
Tomorrow we take all the babies to the clinic for their check ups. We are all hoping that everything checks out fine. I am curious to find out how much Alicia weighs. We have struggled the last couple of days with napping during the day, she has been really fussy and waking a lot during her naps crying. She fell asleep last night at the restaurant during dinner and we just laid her in the crib when we got back to the hotel. She woke up screaming at about 10pm and was inconsolable for quite awhile. Paul finally took her into bed with him and she slept until almost 6am……….that’s the first time she has slept all through the night for us.
Only 3 full days left and then we head for home!!! We can’t wait. We are missing our little Marcus and we are missing home and our bed and American food and our families and our friends!!
We love you Marcus…..have a great day and have fun with Brendan and Gabby tonight!
