Trip To Museum

Friday, 2/17/06
Today has been a fun day. Emily continues to be a great little travelor and big sister, Sarah finally had her first BM (after four days we were starting to worry and resorted to prunes at breakfast), and she is becoming more interactive, and we got out of the hotel to do a little touring.

We got the pictures of crying Sarah right after breakfast this morning as we were preparing to leave for our tour. Those were the only tears we saw today; we thought it would be fun to have some pictures like that to show her as she gets older.

We visited a museum that displayed what was found in the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng from around 433 BC. Amazing artifacts, but the best part was seeing the huge set of bells that were found, 65 in all, made out of bronze. Each bell is shaped in a way that it can provide two different tones, depending on how it is struck. It was found fully set up in one of the four chambers of the tomb...it was an amazing site to see. There was a reproduction set made and we were lucky enough to enjoy four songs played in the concert hall using the bells, as well as other asian instruments. It was truly fascinating to watch.

Secondly we visited a carpet factory, however, we didn't get to see any production. It was only a display room. Carpets were all from silk, handmade, and the smallest size, about 12"x12" was $250US and went up from there. Beautiful to look at! One of the only things Wuhan is really known for is its carpets, which is why our guide, Shirley, took us to see it. (By the way, Emily's hometown, Yangzhou is known for its embroidery.)

One of our pictures today shows us with our two guides, Molly, in pink on the left, and Shirley in the plaid coat. Molly just graduated from college and has been working for Children's Home Society (our adoption agency) for only 7 months. She lives in Guangzhou and will be with us all of next week as well. She is quite a joy and loves to talk about her boyfriend, whom she met in college...she is often text messaging him and yesterday, she showed a few of us a picture of him. We all agreed he is very cute.

Shirley was with us four years ago when we adopted Emily...very wonderful lady. She is married and lives near Shanghai and travels quite a bit with her job, usually for 10-12 days at a time. She is so good to work with, very thorough and does anything she can to make our trip enjoyable and easy. It was very good to see her again.

Lastly, you'll see the pictures of the Wal*Mart Supercenter that I took for my friends and colleagues at ConAgra...after all the fun we have working with Wal*Mart, and all the trips to Bentonville, I figured it was worth getting some shots of the first Wal*Mart I've seen in China. You'll notice how big it is, how upscale it looks, especially compared to everything else I've seen here, and that there is a Pizza Hut, and McDonalds and a KFC all located on the lower level. I would have loved to stop and shop for a bit, but that wasn't an option as the bus was only rented for a set period of time.

Tonight, my husband Steve and Mark Alexander are planning to walk down to Pizza Hut and bring back pizzas to the room. We also thought some card games or Scrabble might be in order. It certainly is nice to have our friends here with us. Emily spent the afternoon watching a movie with Anne in the Alexander's room. Yesterday, Anne spent the afternoon with us and she and Emily played with 'Disney girls' and Barbies.

Sarah is laughing more today and we found her to be ticklish, especially on her thighs and the bottom of her feet. She actually came to me today, once, but it is a start. She doesn't mind me holding her, but she usually turns away when I get close. Steve reminds me that Emily did the same at first, though Emily seemed much more resigned to us being around her and just tolerated us at first. She likes to share whatever she is eating - she passes a piece to us, and then we give it back to her and it goes back and forth continuously. It is always held and given to us between her thumb and first finger. She has the tiniest little rosebud mouth I've ever seen...overall she is quite petite looking, but she surely is heavy when we carry her. Both Steve and I are glad we have a stroller with us, and yes, we've gotten her used to that as well (the first day it caused a screaming fit).

Time to post.

love,
the lloyds

Pictures From 2-16-06

Sarah loves to play on the floor with pillows

People stop Emily all the time and want to talk to her.
She takes pictures of them so she doesn't have to respond.
They assume she can speak Chinese so the camera is a defense mechanism.

Emily gets to McDonalds

This McDonalds is in side a department Store.
The food is close to western tasting.

There were no lines everyone just kind of pushed their way

to the front.

(Hey classmates and teachers: She has her All Saints Shirt on)

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Our Hotel window overlooks a middle school;

here are some students waiting for class.

Classes start at 8:00 am and ends at 6:00 pm














There is a court yard for recess. It is cement with basketball courts

and ping pong tables.

Our First Full Day

Today was the first full day that we had Sarah with us. She is a beautiful little girl, but is she every obstinate. She wants her way, wants to do what she wants when she wants it, or she pushes things away, pushes us away and throws a fit. Quite a difference from Emily when she was a baby.

We did enjoy some gentler sides of Sarah, as she got quite cuddly a few times, and we had fun when Emily and Sarah played on pillows on the floor. She seems to prefer Steve to me, though he's been in the room more with her as I had to try to find the Bank of China today (I'll tell you that one in a minute). She talks quite a bit and will try to carry on a conversation with you, and she had her first bath today, which was tolerated, but we didn't get the tantrum we expected from her.

Emily continues to be tremendous help and doing exceptionally well with all this. She is very patient with Sarah and helped with her diaper changes, with feeding her and is generally very concerned about Sarah's well-being. She broke down once today, telling me she wanted to go home and another time telling me she just wanted to be alone as she didn't know what would make her happy. This is a long trip for a little person.

OK, Bank of China. Our hotel will not cash American Express Traveler Checks. The only place, we are told, that will cash them in Wuhan is the Bank of China. Our Chinese guide said it is only a 10 minute cab ride and wouldn't go with us. Three families needed to run to the bank so a rep from each family headed out with our little card with our destination printed on it by the concierge. No taxi would take us, they just kept pointing us to another cab, and then finally to the other side of the street, even with the bellhop trying to help us. They kept pointing and telling the bellhop it was just a few blocks away; we should walk. We headed off, and came to a bank called the Construction Bank of China. According to a partial English-speaking manager, they could not help the other two families that needed a credit card advance, but they could cash my traveler checks; however, the Bank of China was just a few blocks away, so we decided to stick together and all go there and he seemed to like that idea. Many blocks later and we've stopped in the Agriculture Bank of China, the Merchants China Bank, etc. etc., and yes, a Bank of China, which is too small to cash my checks. It is drizzling out and we have no umbrella and we were ambushed by four little kids, about 5 years old, hanging on us begging for money. One literally threw her arms around the legs of the guy with us and hung on. One grabbed my arm and walked with me for over a block, pleading. She was the size of Emily...it was hard to watch. We finally gave up after stopping at five banks. It seems no one here really knows the difference between banks; as long as it is a bank, it is "the bank of China."

We headed back to the first bank that had said they could help me. I was waived upstairs and got there to find not a soul in the room. Went back downstairs and the English speaker looked confused, and then went with me to a woman behind the desk. No cash check...go to Bank of China. We gave up and walked 'home.' Later today, we solicited our guide to go with us to the Bank of China.

To top it all off, I tried to convert 2-$100 bills at our hotel and there were little black ink marks on them. Sorry, they can't convert them for me. Can you believe it? I had to go back to the room and find other bills to convert into RMB.

All the families did get a trip to the Carrefour, something like a Super Wal*Mart, that our guide set up for us. It took about an hour and 15 minutes for everyone to find what we needed...certainly harder to shop when you can't read anything. We did see many brand names we recognized, like Tide, Pampers, Maggie, Ritz, Kraft, Lays, Bugles, Coke, Pepsi and Johnson and Johnson.




Back in the room late this afternoon, it was difficult as everyone was tired and Sarah was overly hungry. Two kids do keep you busy and it is especially hard living in two rooms with no activities, limited TV in English (ESPN and HBO), and limited food that a five year old and baby can or will eat. We're only two days away from being half way through our journey.

Ann

Valentine’s Day Is Now Gotcha Day!

Hours before Sarah

(Bloggerers Note.....The pictures posted here are some that Steve got before we were officially introduced to Sarah. Some how he was able to get in the room where they were keeping the girls. We posted them long after this entry was made so they don't follow the text but thought they should be posted anyway)


Emily really likes to hear from her classmates. She gets a big smile on her face when we tell her that some one from her class has written. She wants Ava to know she misses her class too and she will be back in one week. She wants everyone to know that we found one store (the size of a closet on the street) that sells popcorn. She also found a McDonalds and ate Chicekn Nuggets and french fries and liked it. The sweet and sour sauce tastes the same as in Lakeville. And she played at the Playland with other kids; it was fun. We also met three other families from the U.S. that were there with their new Chinese daughters; they have been in Wuhan for a week already and were ready to leave for Guangzhou for the last part of their trip. It was nice to have others to talk with in English.

Our hotel room looks out over what appears to be a middle school and a chime plays when school starts, ends and when the classes change. The children started school around 8am and we were surprised that the school day wasn't done until 6pm! At lunch, they all leave the schoool area and go out into the street to buy their lunches and walk with their friends. We were out walking in the area when the lunch break started and it was like walking at the State Fair...just a solid throng of people. We watched them push their way into what appeared to be a favorite shop, a place that sold magazines, and the favorite lunchtime foods were cups of noodles, sausages on a stick and ice cream.

Lastly, our friends, the Alexanders, arrived yesterday and we met up at the hotel. Their daugher, Anne, who is five, is from the same orphanage that Emily was at in Yangzhou. We've stayed very close with the families we traveled with when we brought Emily home to the U.S. and we synced up our paperwork this time with the Alexanders so that we could again travel together. I think both Emily and Anne were very excited to see a familiar face.

I would normally have downloaded pictures of these momentous events but I have no way of getting our pictures from the camera into Ann’s computer. I am going to make a run to a store this morning to try and buy what I need, should be interesting. I will insert those pictures when I am able.

Monday 2/13/2006 6:00 AM

First the technical stuff. I found a way to view postings. When you post something on the blog the information is automatically forwarded to Ann’s hotmail account and we can read your post from there. So this means Grandma no longer needs to pass that information on.

The only tense moment we had in our travels is when we had to change planes when we first arrived in Guangzhou. I asked for help trying to find our next gate. We were finally pointed in the right direction and were standing in line to check in when a lady walked up to us and asked “Where you go?” When we told her Wuhan she told us to follow her. We did and she snaked her way to a particular check in line, shooing away others who were in line ahead of us. She looked like some airline or government official. She took our tickets, checked our luggage and then walked rapidly away telling us to follow her. She headed for an elevator. I thought she was leading us to our gate but Ann said it didn’t seem right. Why would she take off so quickly and want to go down a level. I thought nothing of it until we got off and started walking to a deserted part of the airport. Ann was right, something was off, but she had our tickets and was again about ten paces ahead of us! We got to the end of the corridor when a man came down an elevator shaft at the very moment we arrived. He told us our luggage was over weight and we need to pay $200.00 dollars in fines. Now I don’t know a lot but one thing I do know Ann would never make a $200.00 dollar mistake. I asked him how much our bags weighed and he asked me if we had U.S. money. The lady still had our tickets but she was in reach and I snatched them from her hand and told Ann, who was pushing Emily in the stroller, to start moving. I had our carry-on luggage and headed for a spot where I saw people. Behind us the con artist was saying we need to pay $200.00 fine. As we got further away I heard the guy say we could pay only $100.00 fine. He caught up with us and told us to go “this way” I said no and told him I didn’t trust him. After that all he wanted to do was blend into the background so we couldn’t point him out and he left us alone. I have got to say I think the experience has put us an edge on this trip. I am not looking forward to getting into a Taxi.

We had a three hour wait in Guangzhou and then took an uneventful plane ride to Wuhan where we were met, as planned, with a shuttle from the airport to the May Flower Hotel. We checked in, unpacked, then went to the hotel restaurant to eat. The only thing Emily liked was the rice. After dinner we went for a walk. Emily says she like China because of all the stores and people on the streets. It is a pretty gritty location and doesn’t afford westerners like ourselves many opportunities to shop for our daily needs, unlike Nanjing.
We will have to take a cab to where ever we need to go, kind of scary given what happened at the airport.

Wuhan has a blue collar feel to it. We got plenty of stares from the locals as we walked with Emily. You could see they were trying to process the information their eyes were delivering to their brains. Yesterday was the last day of the two week long Chinese New Year celebration. At about 5:00 pm you could see fire works from our hotel window that lasted for about 2 hours, but the cool thing was about a half hour into those fire works another location about ½ mile away began to shoot off their fire works. Then another location, and another, and so on, at one point the entire sky was full of fireworks everywhere I looked. This went on until after 2 in the morning. It was really quite the sight. After our walk Ann crashed around 7:30, Emily was down at 9:00 and I didn’t get to sleep until about 1:30am.

It is 6:00 Monday morning as I write this. Emily and Ann are still in bed. I can’t believe how well Emily has taken to this trip. And now as I type, you won’t believe this, but more fire works are going off!

We are only about 36 hours away from meeting Sarah and holding her in our arms for the first time.

We Have Arrived!!

It is 11:00 In Wuhan and it has been 32 hrs since we left the comfort of our home. We have lots to tell you as it was a pretty eventful trip. However our minds are fried and our nerves are frayed so this won't be long. We just wanted everyone to know we arrived safely.

Before Our Journey Begins

We hope this blog of our visit to Wuhan will keep our friends up to date. We also hope it will be a resource for other families traveling to China to adopt.

If you have found this site through a search engine and you have recently been to Wuhan or adopted from the Huanggang Social Welfare Institute, Hubei Provience please post your comments here as I'm sure we will find them helpful. We are also willing to answer any questions you might have for us regarding our travels. Wish us luck!