We arrived in Guangzhou Saturday evening after several hours of travel. Guangzhou (pronounced gwahng-joe) is in the southernmost province of China, while Shenyang is in the north. Sort of similar to flying from New Hampshire to Florida in the states. The weather is different, too, obviously. It is very hot and humid here and there are 19 million people living in this city. It's big.
We checked into our hotel, which is very nice. There is a McDonald's across the parking lot and a Starbucks just off the lobby. This probably makes me sound like I eat at these places all the time at home, which I do not! It's just that after a week and a half of dim sum and Chinese food, it is nice to have something familiar. We love Chinese food, but we do not want to eat it for every meal. It is sometimes nice to have, say, pancakes for breakfast instead of fried noodles or pork dumplings.
The first day here, we visited a few touristy sites, which was very interesting. The first place was the Banyan temple, named for the Banyan trees growing there. There were a number of statues and people burning incense and leaving gifts on the altars. Caleb had a lot of questions for me: Where are the statues of Jesus? (they are not here, this is a different type of temple). Why are they leaving gifts? (Because they believe it will please their gods.) Can we take the gifts? (No.) Why don't they believe in Jesus? (..... I don't know, son.) That probably makes me sound inept at explaining religious diversity to my child, but it was difficult. Caleb has always been very pro-Jesus, if you will. He has a lot of concern that people do not know about Him and has talked in the past about moving to China to be a missionary. Our wonderful, sweet-hearted son.
We also visited the Old Chen house, which is an enormous home built for one of the oldest and wealthiest families in China. It was really amazing, but of course, not anything like a mansion that we would think of in the United States. It is more indoor/outdoor rooms with incredible carvings, both on the exterior of the home and on the relics inside. They have ivory carvings, sometimes with the tusk shape still intact, they they create the most intricate scenes of ships and houses out of. I can't really capture how cool it really was.
Temperature wise, cool was not the word at all. It was actually quite hot. And steamy. This made for some cranky kids, so I'm thankful we got these pictures at all, with one or two smiling people. We also saw our guide from three years ago when we adopted Ellie. His name is Jason and he works for our agency, we were just assigned different guides this time. But we all recognized each other and got a picture with him. The guides here in Guangzhou are simply wonderful. They are so very helpful and kind toward us.
Monday was Asher's official birthday. He is seen here (wearing my glasses) proudly displaying his first lost tooth, which came out in Beijing. Interestingly, the tooth fairy visits Beijing as well and leaves Chinese yuan instead of American dollars. On his birthday, the guides sang to him "Happy Birthday" in Chinese and everyone in the group tried to join in. He was happy and smiling in that, "aw, shucks," head tucking, shy sort of way of his. We were able to get a cake from the bakery here in the hotel, which was more of a very large, rich brownie. They gave us candles and we sang to him ourselves in the room later in the evening.
We are having a good time, but we are ready to come home. I keep thinking that it is Jia's home, too, but he is in between right now. Although we will be happy to fly home, he is leaving his home country. I know the other kids have adjusted and he will, too, but I want to recognize how difficult it may be for him. We are blessed with so much and he has so much to gain, but change is also hard. Still, it will be good to be home. We are waiting on our consulate appointment, which is tomorrow. Then, we have to wait another day before we can actually leave the country, although I'm not sure why that is a rule. We just follow. So, we leave on Friday to fly home. Three more days of this fascinating country and we will be boarding that plane, homebound.
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