Happy Mother's Day

We have to wait a few days to get a passport for Grace. So, just a quickish post to let you know that we are still here and doing fine.

Today is Mother’s Day and I think it is one of two that Christy will not easily forget. (The other is the birth of our youngest son, on Mother’s Day.) Not that very much happened today, but on this trip even the do nothing days are memorable.

We took Grace to a nearby playground today. There were hundreds of people there, almost all of them locals. Grace did not want to play, she just stood there taking it all in. On the way back we stopped and had coffee at Starbucks. I don’t think Grace was impressed but her parents and granddad loved sitting down inside for a little slice of the west. Mom and daughter are napping now.

Right now Grace is still a very shy little girl. She likes to sit back and watch what is happening and does not initiate a lot of interaction with others. When she gets tired she pretty much shuts down and refuses to cooperate with whatever is going on. (I think she gets that from me.) There are however starting to be more and more times that she opens up to us and smiles, evens laughs. She likes to see balloons fly around the room, she likes to wash her hands, she likes to push the buttons for the elevator, she likes to look at pictures of herself on our camera and she even likes to be tickled. I pray that God will bless this little girl as she learns that she is not alone; that she can trust us, and Him.

We took an interesting walking tour through some of the city yesterday. Much of it was through small streets with market vendors everywhere. The streets were tight with people and from time to time little buses would honk their way through. There were lots of dried herbs and insects for sale. Everything from ants to beetles to scorpions to rubber-banded bundles of centipedes. We saw one man drying a blanket full of scorpions on the side of the road. A little further down we came to a sections with big red tubs of live scorpions. (big or small, pick your size.) Apparently the scorpions are popular for making scorpion wine – a single scorpion (alive or dried) is placed in a bottle of wine for several months. This is supposed to give the wine a good taste and certain beneficial qualities… I will take their word for it.

At one point our guide spoke with two girls running a shop for a bit and then they all laughed. He translated for us and said that he had told them, “no, we are not French”. Apparently that was a good thing. It seems that many of the Chinese people are not happy with the French; due to Olympic torch protests.

The markets street opened into a huge urban pedestrian street full of people. It had stores, building, signs and screens to rival Times Square. There were some Mc Donalds, KFCs and a Pizza Hut, but most of the stores I did not recognized. We stopped at a pearl market to buy some pearls for Grace when she gets older and then had lunch at a north eastern Chinese/Korean restaurant. We were treated to folk singers and the general feeling was that it was some of the best food we have had on our trip.

We have no plans yet for tonight and tomorrow we expect to get Grace’s Chinese passport.

Christy or I will try to post again soon.

- Mike