Sunday, June 4, 2017

“Jesus knows the depth of our hearts.” ~James P. Campbell

Settlng In…

Hi Everyone,

Well, today started on the quick side. When I set the alarm last night, I forgot to check the clock for AM/PM. We woke up at 9:13 and had to be in the lobby at 9:30 ready to leave. Whoops! We made it without too much fuss, but I am glad it was just Jonathan and I. The good news is that we slept well for about 9 hours so we shouldn’t have jet lag issues.

Unfortunately our alarm issue meant that we missed the hotel breakfast in the cool revolving restaurant upstairs. I’m looking forward to see the views and I’m sure the food will be great at well. I’ll have to tell you about it tomorrow.

Our only required activity today was to exchange our dollars into RMB. The banks here are open on Sunday although they have fewer tellers working. It feels very strange to do banking on Sunday! The banks are the only place that can exchange the amount of money we need though so that is what we did. Our guide’s eyes were big at the sight of the converted funds. It makes a pile when you convert it to RMB for the “mandatory donation” (a funny term to me). The conversion is almost 7 yuans per dollar. He commented that he could not image that much money to which I replied that it required saving it up for sure. Meanwhile, the rest of the adoption fees are less here than they have been in the other provinces so far...a nice surprise.

Our next stop was a grocery store where we grabbed water since you can’t drink the water here, some noodles and fruit for lunch and a few extra noodles and snacks for the next few days. As usual, the store was “China busy” which is a different level than “US busy” for shopping. Since most people shop for each day’s groceries on that day, the markets are packed. Jonathan thinks they are busier in the morning, but they always seem busy to me.

We were able to do a quick chat with home and talk with the kids there when we got back to the hotel. They were headed to bed, but Ted called them out to visit for a few minutes and tell us about the parade at Town & Country Days. It sounded like they had fun. Being able to do a face to face visits via Google hangouts is a great deal…live and free…perfect. I was glad I already had a VPN set up on my computer before we left home so we could use Google (otherwise it is blocked in China).

After lunch, we decided to explore the hotel and then around the hotel. The “gymnasium” made us laugh. It was just us and FOUR pieces of exercise equipment in a large bedroom sized room. Then we tried to visit the “Card & Game” room. As soon as the elevator opened and the smoke started hitting us, we knew this probably wasn’t for us. We did walk in, but…No thanks!

We did much better when we left the hotel. Our guide was very happy to tell us about the MacDonald’s & Pizza Hut right by the hotel last night. He must have a lot of people who want familiar food when they come. We were hoping for something else and we found it thankfully.

Right across the road from our hotel via an overpass walkway is a HUGE shopping mall. It has 11 floors full of stuff…mostly clothes…and lots of different food. I love the fruit market and plan to go back. It has ready to eat fruit, which is a great blessing when you don’t have a kitchen to cut up your own. It also has a restaurant so I suspect we will eat there as well in the days to come. Jonathan bought a science kit at the bookstore and we both people watched like crazy. I was wishing I could shop with my older girls here. There is the sleek, short skirt look for sure, but most of the girls are in very modest, flowing, pretty clothes…slacks, dresses, skirts and shirts. It’s so different from when we try to shop in the states. I only saw a couple of girls dressed in clothes that I would not want my girls to wear and that is a statement since we say a lot of people.

We went to the Chinese restaurant in the hotel tonight for dinner. Peter, our guide, told us it was part of a very good chain here and was not owned by the hotel so the prices were good. It is the first time I have ever been asked if we had ordered enough food. I’m used to being told that we were ordering too much. Most of the food was fancy seafood dishes and we just wanted pork noodles and beef fried rice which stumped the waitress. We had enough, but the people we were seated with had about three times as much and I think they wondered about us. The seating was a large round table which we normally would seat our entire family at, but they had it set for a seating of two on each side. I hadn’t thought about it, but since we are near the ocean there is a lot of seafood here.

Well the housekeeping just came and fixed the TV for us. Jonathan is happily watching a cartoon about two bears that always go in a man’s house and take his stuff and food. He remembers it from before and is enjoying it. It reminds me a bit of the “Smurfs” in terms of the characters interactions.