Today was a busy day for our Lili and she did amazingly well considering it was not her best night (or mine). She has gotten her Dad’s(and now my cold) and she hacked and coughed for about 3-4 hours last night.  The room is really dry and I don’t think that helped matters and I spent the time trying to figure out the best way to keep her head elevated. We finally found a solution that made both of us feel better but she did awaken at her normal 6:30 and Thom took over giving her her bottle and then taking her out on a walk so I could sleep longer.  Here are some pictures from their walk.  Thom will have to fill in more details. 

 

One type of morning constitution

 A different type

Morning commutes in Guangzhou city

 

 View of Guangzhou from the bridge

Shamian Island is an interesting place in the morning.  Everyone is out doing their morning constitutionals and it is very fun to walk around and see people in their normal daily routines versus trying to sell us something. Don’t get me wrong, however, people do still try to sell you something if they are a shop keeper.  They seem to have all different kinds of group “aerobics” going on in the street.  Thom even heard the older people doing their exercises to “Like a Prayer” by Madonna complete with 70 year olds doing pelvic thrusts, or at least that is what Thom tells me.

After Lili’s morning nap, we headed out to the zoo.  Originally, we were going to try the metro because it is supposed to be much faster than the driving.  Of course, just about everything is faster than the driving and if you want to find cities with roads that seem to circle about endlessly, China is the place to come.  They have taken the Massachusets rotary and made it a spiral stairway.  Lili, however, was not feeling to well and since we were unsure exactly where the metro was and how far from the zoo we ended up, we decided to take a cab.  I had found a restaurant in the Rough Guide(which is only 1.5 years old) that specialized in soups from Jiangxi Province and was near the zoo, so that sounded good for lunch.  Our cab driver could not find it so he got out to ask the doorman of a hotel and after they both looked blank about the name that the hotel had written down for us, we concluded, correctly, that it no longer existed. The doorman indicated that Thom could go into the hotel and ask and he came out with the brother of the owner, who was named Robert and spoke excellent english and took us down the street to a restaurant and then offered to order for us and we invited him to eat with us.  Once again Lili was a hit.  She loves to eat and gets this huge smile on her face while eating and totally plays the crowd.  The food was fabulous and we tried some new things including a pork that is almost like peking duck.  Lili and I both thought that and the dumplings were the best dishes although I also thought the greens were quite good.  I think Lili found them a bit to bitter for her infant taste buds but she is definetely a girl that does not like plain food.  We tried giving her white rice the other night because it was really the only thing she could eat that we got and she would only eat it after we poured a sauce over it.

Thom and Robert outside the restaurant

Robert then pointed us to the zoo which was a short walk away.  We are sure that our friends Kim, Ben, Teagan and Kaelan will appreciate the fact that we found a zoo they have never gone to and we have taken Lili to her first zoo at the age of 10 months. Maybe we will be able to match their zoo count when she is as old as they are but I doubt it.  We enjoyed the zoo although we sometimes felt like a walking exhibit. We went up behind the ostrich exhibit and this couple wanted to have their picture taken with us.  First he took the picture of her standing with us then she took the picture of him with us.  It was quite funny.  At another point, we stopped to have our picture taken at the plastic chickens and the next thing Thom knew Lili and I were surrounded.  At the dinosaur exhibit, when we finished having our picture taken people flocked over to the dinosaur that we had been sitting on.

 

Posing in front of the plastic On the triceratops

 

As Thom says the zoo has a feel similar to what a zoo might have been like in the US in the 70s with small exhibits and a lot of cages, but clean with some interactive exhibits. Of course, it also had some weird things like the Pekinese in the children’s zoo but I guess dogs have not been common in China as pets until recently. 

   

Ostrich with personality Toucan  Crane like on Lili’s wall

   

Flamingos standing and nesting  Pelican  Dog at zoo

 

Thom’s favorite part was when he had the chance to go and feed the Macaque monkeys. The zookeeper even showed Thom what to do to get the monkey to climb onto his arm for the food. Could he look more thrilled?

Thom feeding the monkey

Tomorrow, I think we will hang out around the island and the area just over the bridge and get some packing done.  We need another suitcase which is not surprising although I am pretty sure that Thom will still end up with about 9 carry-ons.  Since we are not travelling with the group, we are willing to go over the weight limit which will not be hard since Lili does not count as a person with luggage yet and I am sure that there will be most of a suitcase for her.

My big smile attracts a crowd as I get my picture taken. -c

 

This is what I look like at dinner after I’m full and happy, before I melt down from being tired. I’m also learning how to model for daddy. Apparently he wants me to hold still for a complete second so the picture won’t be blurry. I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’m trying the best I can. I don’t know why but he keeps pointing this big black thing at me. I wonder if he’ll stop anytime soon…. -L

Apparently in Guangzhou there is a game similar to Hackeysack except it’s played by men and women of all ages and the hackeysack is an oversized badminton shuttlecock except with plastic washers where the rubber bulb would be. There are hundreds of people playing this game all over the park I tried to ask what the game is called or even what the shuttlecock/hackeysack is called and all I got was basically it’s called Guangzhou….Yea, somehow I don’t think they knew what I was asking. Of course the fact that I’m asking in English and they speak Mandarin or Cantonese might have something to do with it. My Mandarin seems to have devolved down to a few stock phrases and numbers. I occasinally break out with a word or phrase from my tutoring sessions but it’s usually a surprise to me and even more of a surprise to whomever I’m speaking with. So I repeat the word or phrase and then the person with whom I’m trying to communicate usually smiles, laughs, repeats what I said and then says, in english, “your chinese is very good”. As you can tell from this story the culture of saving face and politeness is alive and well in China.

 

A typical co-ed group of people playing Chinese Hackeysack (once I find out the actual name, I’ll start using it)

Back to Chinese Hackeysack. I was playing in the park today during Lili’s nap with several men and women, most of whom were over 60. They could do amazing tricks without seeming to move a muscle or breaking a sweat. I, of course, had sweat streaming down my face and missed many opportunities to “hackey” the shuttlecock. Occasionally I’d get lucky with a behind the back desperation lunge using my size 13 feet and I’d earn several thumbs up and even a mei hua – (beatiful, fine, etc.) I was definitely the novelty and several people would join our group of 5 or 6 with apparently the sole goal of seeing how good the “Lao Wai” was, because I got far more than my fair share of shots directed my way, after a few minutes demonstrating I could in fact handle the simple shots, the group just kind of gelled and focused on keeping the shuttlecock in the air, tapping it only once and making sure to include every member of the group. Every 10 minutes or so, 1 or 2 new people would wander over and mumble something in mandarin or cantonese and join the group as others left. Basically the core of the group was a 60-year-old woman and a living breathing caricture of an old chinese man with grey hair and a long wispy beard, and me, the balding slightly paunchy American. Of course they were incredible and would have impressed even the most jaded group of deadheads hackeying outside a Phish concert. (is that a verb?) All in all, I held my own without embarrassing myself too many times. But we all knew who was teaching the game and who was being schooled even though we weren’t having many in-depth conversations.

After an hour I was beat, but the men in their suits and the women in their flats were still going strong. In fact several of the people I was playing with were still at it several hours later when we all went out for lunch. Of course then I was no longer the star since Lili was with us. And boy is she a star.

After lunch we went out and about in the city riding in a couple of Taxis, shopping, and generally trying to get something of a sense of this massive city. It’s size is truly amazing and the density of population makes NYC look like a ghost town without the tumbleweeds.

 

Let’s play find the Lao Wai (foreigner) in this photo.

No, that isn’t an optical illusion the taxi won’t fit in the gap. But unlike in the states there was no animosity, no road rage, no middle-fingers upraised in an angry salute, just a quiet peaceful acceptance punctuated by horns. The traffic is the most chaotic I’ve ever seen. People randomly stop until they decide whether to turn or not, bikes, mopeds, handtrucks, three-wheelers, pedestrians, Buses, taxis and luxury sedans all mix together in this glorious stew that is Ghuangzhou traffic. It makes Brazillian drivers look like calm, patient, orderly, little old ladies out for a Sunday drive. It makes the Costa Rican drivers look like model citizens aiming for another AAA discount. Of course German Drivers would be in apoplexy here because there doesn’t seem to be any rules to follow. But given all that there are surprising few accidents.

 

Indoor waterfall at the White Swan Hotel with a large number of very hungry Koi fish, some almost two feet long.

The White Swan hotel is quite an experience. After Nanchang, where for a week we didn’t see a single non-asian person who wasn’t with our group (they were a few Indian, Vietnamese, and Thai guests at the hotel however), this hotel must have 75-100 or more families all adopting. So imagine a breakfast dining room packed with couples in every flavor of American, all of whom have at least one small chinese person at their table. Sometimes they have two or more since they been down the adoption path before. Sprinkle in a few asian and american business men traveling solo and wearing suits and you have a very surreal meal. Most of the kids seem to be between 1-2 years of age, mostly girls, but there are a few boys. Lili is probably the smallest baby we’ve seen and probably one of the younger ones in residence in the hotel, but of course she is the cutest and we have the photos to prove it. We’ve been very thankful that she isn’t walking and toddling, yet, because watching the parents going from no kids to an instant 2-year-old, looks exhausting. In fact tonight at dinner with our 10 families in a local restaurant, the girls started their first chorus of crying. It wasn’t one or two girls, it was almost all of them. Both they and their parents looked exhausted (that includes us and our perfect Lili) and people quickly gave up thoughts of eating and fled back to their hotel rooms.

That’s all for now. More pictures tomorrow.  -tjm