Out and about

Yesterday, Danny and I went out to explore beyond our local neighborhood in Guangzhou. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-4w1DjcGjU&feature=em-upload_owner

First we walked to the subway station (see link above for video). The subway station was significantly more congested than the "sidewalks" of the street we walked on to get there. 

I was well-armed with all the station names, subway lines and number of stops needed for our trip to another part of town where many adoptive parents stay, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that everything related to the subway (ticket machines, signs, announcements and electronic maps in the subway cars) were all given in English as well as Chinese characters and pinyin (Chinese spelled out in roman letters). Announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. With all this information available, I always knew exactly where I was and that only left the challenge of being able to enter and exit the subway when I wanted to among the crushing crowds of people. 

Danny has a thorough appreciation of my Western tendencies to queue in a line and to expect that if I am standing at the front of a line that my turn will be next. He knows that I've got this all wrong and does his best to make sure I'm aggressive enough to actually get our turn. On the subway, I tell him "this one" as we start to pull in to our stop. He then waits until the train slow, grabs my hand and maneuvers us through a solid wall of people. I'm pretty sure this kid has never taken public transportation but he's got a knack for getting himself where he needs to be. I'm going to hold off on any explanation of queuing and politely waiting your turn until we get home because his skills are serving us really well here. 

We traveled to the Central Business district which was quite sterile and modern compared to our area of town. There are a number of restaurants and high-end stores there.  We opted to go to Trustmart which is what Walmart is called in China. It was spread out over two floors and had most of the same categories of items as Walmart. It did not look at all like a Walmart. It reminded my a lot of a Ben Franklin or Woolworth's. 

We walked around for a while and then took the subway back to our hotel. The trip back at 5 pm was more crowded than our earlier trip but by that time we were old pro's.

Here's another 

view of our neighborhood from our hotel room. On some of the main streets, the buildings have very modern facades but the buildings themselves are ver simply constructed out of concrete block and tin or wooden roofs. 

A trip to the store

Meat on a stick from a street vendor

Danny's picks from the supermarket: giant grapefruit, tiny oranges, yogurt drinks, rolls, box of unknown item, big bag of dried yet plump round objects (cherries? tomatoes? Peppers? Dates?) that he was very excited about and a whole smoked fish, sliced for our convenience. 

Mama doesn't speak Mandarin

Scott, Kai and Eva are on their way back to Cambodia for a few days before flying home. Danny and I have arrived safely in Guangzhou where we will be hanging out for the next 8 days.

 Up until now, Danny hasn't said more than a few sentences at a time and almost always spoke in a whisper except when he was playing with Eva and Kai. All that seemed to change today. Perhaps surviving his first airplane trip (which he had to live through with only very minimal explanation of what was going on)has emboldened him. Today, he gave me a 5 minute dissertation on lions. It was very detailed and passionate and seemed to talk about some differences between mother and father lions, the babies, lions' sharp claws and teeth, and possibly a couple of different lion attacks on people. This was followed by a 5 minute one-sided discussion about the skyline of Guangzhou and everything going on outside our hotel window. I tried to participate with a number of ohh's, hmm's and head nods. I also threw down all the relative Mandarin I could come up with - primarly "here", "there", "this", "that", "big", "small" and "blue". I also managed to work in a couple of numbers. 

 Danny asked me to go for a walk, so we are off to explore a bit. I imagine that he wants to walk around while he tries to sort through why he got the parents that are clearly incapable of basic conversational language and have a distinct inability to find food that is spicy enough for his palate. 

 And... as I am finishing this up, I'm pretty sure he's trying to teach me the names of the days of the week. Maybe there's a little bit of hope for me yet!

Panda Day

Today we went to the Panda Research Center in Chengdu. Most of the world's pandas are in this province of China. 

Red pandas don't really look at all like pandas and don't appear to act like them either, but they have the same diet and habitat. 

Adoption Day

We will go back to the Civil Affairs office today to finalize the Chinese side of our adoption. We are having a good day. 

Meet Danny!

Great day in the Smith house.  We met our new son today.  He is gonna fit right in.  And bonus!  He is a Bears Fan.

One day to go!

Arrived in Chengdu.  Checked into hotel at 2:30am.  Getting some rest.  We all meet our new family member tomorrow.  Very excited!