Guangzhou day 2, shopping adventures

We are all much better today we are happy to report. Megan Su Xue Wei's fever is gone, and she was wanting to explore shops with us today! She introduced herself to someone in one of the shops today as Megan, for all of you who cannot pronounce her Chinese name! We have discovered that we have been pronouncing it a bit wrong all this time ourselves. The correct pronunciation takes a bit to get down! One other little tidbit I forgot to share with all of you, which is quite amusing, we received her school records, one of the classes she completed last year, required by her school, was Gun shooting. Thats right, our daughter had a whole year (not just a semester) of learning how to shoot a gun. Hmmmm
So, on to today's adventures. We started with picking up our large load of laundry- thank God for the cheap laundry service here! Then on to shopping. Asked Megan if she liked any of the beautiful silk traditional Chinese dresses in the shops- Nope, she wanted the wood sword. She did choose a pink silk robe, which she tried on in the store, turned to Jim and said "Daddy, Beautiful!" She is proudly sporting it around our room tonight. By lunch all the kids had tired of shopping, so we headed to Lucy's (an infamous restaurant for all of those that have adopted from China) for some lunch and chocolate milk shakes. Everyone else went back to the hotel for a rest as I shopped until my money was gone. I love this city!
This afternoon we took our group photos on the famous red couch. We posed first as a family, then with all the other families from our agency that have children from the Waiting child program traveling right now. For all of you that do not know what that means, the waiting child program is for children that are over the age of 6, or with various special needs. We have been chatting on the internet with many of these families, so it was nice to finally meet. The last photos were of the children being adopted. I was not sure how she would feel about this since all of the other children were mostly ages 2 and under, there are two 4 year olds- but she happily got behind the couch and smiled proudly. After all of this she looked at Jim and said "Daddy" then wiggled her cheeks to indicate they were tired from smiling!
She had some fun running around the lobby with her new siblings, seems so at ease with them. She is very much like Katie, very happy and quite the comedian.
Before dinner we walked outside to see the pools, the weather is nice here, but not quite swimming weather by my standards. The pool looked lovely, but was cold- Patrick told Kellan he would pay him 20 yuan to jump in the pool (equivalent to just over $2.00) he took him up on it and jumped right in. Megan got quite a kick out of this and had quite a laugh. I am sure she thinks we are crazy.
For dinner we joined another family at Lucy's again- funny thing at dinner, Jim and the other dad were trying (without a lot of luck) to fold a piece of paper into one of those thick triangles to flick across the table- the ones all of us did in grammer school, when Megan said "dad" and held up this swan she had folded out of her napkin- Oh, is going to be fun getting to know this kid! Tomorrow we head for the Visa photo. The rest of the group goes for their medical exam, Megan's was done in Shanghai and are told does not need to be done again. Very rare, but we are thankful not to put her through one more thing. More paperwork tomorrow. then of course, more shopping!
For pictures from today- click Here For all that have asked I took pictures of our adjoining Hotel rooms- wild with 7 people! Kristen, we are at the very end of the hall, and the rooms seem to be much bigger than the one we had in June. Plenty of room to move around, even with the extra roll away bed- Maybe because this is where the adjoining rooms are? We are very happy here- what a wonderful hotel!