Thanks so much for visiting us during our journey, Steve, Heather, Ed, Joe, Emily, Hana, Zeke and Samuel!
Well, today was our U.S. Consulate Appointment. This meant that Leila represented us at the Consulate, by presenting all of our paperwork, and we waited in our hotel room from 10:00 am until 12:00 pm in case there were any questions. During our wait, we worked on organizing and packing and basically waited. By 12:05 the phone hadn’t rung so we figured we were good to go. Right after that, Leila called and told us that we were good to go, so we went.
We met the Patzers for lunch, followed by a little shopping. We tweaked our packing, weighed our bags, and will do our final tweaking again tomorrow since we need to move some things around and distribute the weight a little more evenly. We’re hoping that in the morning we’ll be packed and set to go.
In the evening we met up with the Patzers again and took cabs over to the Pearl River Dinner Boat (it’s called something like that, but since we’re now ready for bed we can’t, for the life of us, remember what it’s really called and have packed the piece of paper that we might have referred to in this situation normally.) Oh well, it was a boat that cruises up and down the river for about 1 ½ hours and you can eat dinner on it.
They served dinner and it included rice, chicken, two weenie things, sprouts, an egg, and soup. Sam ate his, but indicated that the egg wasn’t good (we don’t think it was cooked long enough for a hard boiled egg), Joe and Steve ate some of theirs, and Heather, after taking one look at their meals opted to not touch hers.
The cruise was interesting. Everyone but Sam had a great time. For Sam, some infraction had occurred between he and Joe and he basically had a tantrum and pouted for most of the time. Needless to say, once back at the hotel room, after about an hour discussion with Leila translating, Sam was back on an even keel. We’re hoping we won’t have to continue to revisit the same things over and over again, but time will tell. Further, while we won’t go into detail, we will say that he has been given some concrete marching orders as to what we expect when traveling back to Albuquerque.
Tomorrow is our final day. At 4:00 pm we have to be at the U.S. Consulate and swear that we didn’t lie on any of our paperwork. Once we do that, they’ll give us Sam’s passport with his visa. What a great day it will be.
Blessings to all our friends and family,
Steve, Heather, Joe and Sam, only one more full day in China, and
Ed, Emily, Hana and Zeke at home, along with Grandma and Aunt Sue, ready for us to head home.
