Another interesting day in Changchun. We started off the day with a visit to the Puyi Palace, known as the Puppet Palace for those of you familiar with the last emperor of China. Emperor Puyi ruled over was put in power over Manchuria by the Japanese. He was mainly just a puppet ruler for the Japanese, and lived a very bizarre and lonely life here. He came into power at just 4 years old. The best part of the tour was meeting up with all the school children on tour too. There were many of them from primary and middle school. They swarmed around us when we were outside. One girl in particular translated for the teacher. She was very bold and confident in her English. She was 11 years old, like Joshua, so they had their picture taken together.
After lunch our guide Steve took us to a wonderful dumpling restaurant. All the dumplings are made by hand, and they had a place where you could watch them prepare the dumplings. We tried 12 different kinds, eating dumplings until we were stuffed. It was here that we discovered Jaelyn has used chopsticks before. She would use them to push the food into her mouth. Steve was quite impressed, as he said children don't usually use them until around 4. After lunch we were handing out some gum and Jaelyn was making a fuss for some. Mike finally just handed her a piece and she obviously had chewed gum before too. We've never even given Kaia gum before. We think Jaelyn was exposed to a lot by her foster family, which is good.
We took a 40 minute walk to the Guilin Lu area to see the meat and veggie markets and vendors. We are getting use to the stares and questions and really enjoyed ourselves. We got some great deals on some DVD's too! We hailed a taxi back, but tonight's ride wasn't so harrowing.
We learned today that we will not be able to visit Jaelyn's orphanage tomorrow as planned. On Tuesday all the plans were set, but today the assistant director told our guide that they had been given orders not to allow people to visit anymore. Supposedly this is a new mandate for all of the orphanages. Very strange how quickly things changed. We know many other families have been able to visit. We get back together with the 11 other families in our travel group Saturday, so I will be curious to see how many of them were able to visit their child's orphanage. Instead, we will be visiting a farmer's house tomorrow morning, which I think will be fascinating.
