Day 2 in Guangzhou - Medical Exam - 1/28/2008

It is Monday morning and we woke up to our second day in Guangzhou. The average high temperature for this time of the year is supposed to be 65 F, the average low is supposed to be 50F. Now today is the "hottest" day of the week with an expected highest temperature of 53F and the rest of the week it will be around 45F – with rain showers all the way. Why? We packed all the cloth for Guangzhou in one back and the one for Hohot in another. It turns out that the winter clothes are more appropriate to wear than we thought. The Guangzhou pack stays unpacked.

But, we take it in strides and make the best out of it. This morning we had the physical examination for Jennifer at the Health Clinic – just a formality. There were three departments we need to go through – internal, ear/nose/throat and physical measurements. Jenny did very well. She passed every exam. On our way out of the clinc, she ran into an orphanage mate – a boy who was adopted by an Ohio couple. It was exciting. They talked and compared notes with each other about their adopted families. At the end, it was hard to separate the boy from Jenny because the boy wanted to go home with Jenny instead.

After the medical exam, we spend several hours together with Sue’s sister and her family walking around one of Guangzhou's shopping districts, the one not for the tourists. This was one of the shopping areas for whole sellers. Many people come to Guangzhou shopping and then bring goods home to other parts of the country. You want to see crowds going crazy over shopping?? You have to come here – it was incredibly busy – but lots of fun. We saw what we think is one of the worlds smallest McDonalds – six barstools for eating. It has only ice cream, no burgers. There was a picture of a burger. After the ice cream we ate some meat on a stick from a street vendor. Bert ate the Squid on the stick. It looks ugly but he ensured everybody that it was delicious. Finally we went to a local restaurant and ate some traditional dishes of rice with veggies and meat. Sue had to wait for hers 20 minutes longer than anybody else. According to the waitress they had to make new rice (we came in with 10 people), but we are not sure if they simply ran out of pork ribs and had to go and get another pig. All in all the meal was very good. Josh, our picky eater, ordered fruits with molten chocolate – chocolate fondue. It wasn't the greatest but it was lots of fun.

Before returning to our hotel for a rest, we stopped by some electronic outlet stores. You could buy some nice MP3 players for less than $10. There are some imitation iPod for $10. iPhone is about $120 here. Toby bought micro SD card for his MP3 player. We are happy to find out it works!

After some rest, we went Xiajiu Street – a more civilized shopping street. We had dinner at a nice restaurant. As usual, Sue ordered too much. All was good, except one She thought either she did not order it or she made mistake on ordering it. It was dish of eel. She only smelt it. Berthold and Toby tried and thought it wasn’t too bad. Although Joshua is a picky eater, he actually is much better comparing to Sue’s niece Snow. She barely ate anything.

In a general note – the battle of the female minds continues. They are still fighting to mark their boundaries. All day long we hear "She has that and I haven't" or "If she get's one then I want one (…)" or more general – "this is not fair". When they are on their own they seem to make it work, but around us there is always somebody not quite happy or complaining about what the other one did or had. Jenny is getting a little frustrated at times with Sue since Sue is the only one that can talk to her and therefore criticizes her once in a while. Today we wanted to get a stroller for Jenny, she is not that strong for long walks – that did not do well with Anna. Then Josh picked up Anna to carry her for a little bit since she was not feeling good – that did not go well with Jenny. I think everyone can get the picture.

On other times, they are doing great together. They ate on one table alone together at lunch time. They played on the swing chair. They took a bath together which lasted more than an hour. They watched a Chinese TV show together. Now they are playing in bed.

Anna is doing well. She had fever last night. Joshua had fever the day before. We think it was all because of sudden changing of weather. Our body has hard time to adjust the sudden temperature change from -20F’s to +50F’s within 6 hours. We put Anna on antibiotic this morning. She is all doing well now. We thought we brought two sets of antibiotic, but somehow we had only one with us. We started antibiotic on Jenny a few days ago since she was warm. Thankfully, the Szalai’s came to the rescue with their antibiotic for Anna.

A few interesting facts we learned recently:

o Everywhere you go shopping in China you get these thin plastic shopping bags. The Chinese population uses 3 to 4 BILLION of these plastic bags EVERY DAY. They are so thin that they can hardly be re-used. Now the government has decided to "outlaw" these bags and only allow plastic bags with a certain thickness and force the shops to charge the shoppers a small amount of money for these bags. The idea is to get people to re-use more of these bags and reduce the waste and the resources that go into these bags. We thought that this was an interesting fact to share.

• Here on Shamian Island (http://gocn.southcn.com/English/localculture/200406070067.htm) you run into families with adotpited children every day. One of the topics is the slowdown of adoptions processed for Chinese orhans with NO special needs. We don't know much about it but here are some interesting facts about Chinese adoptions:

Number of Adoptions from China:
2006: 6,493
2005: 7,906
2004: 7,044
2003: 6,859
2002: 5,053

Age/Gender of Children Adopted From China in 2005
Source: INS Immigration Statistics
95% Female
35% under 1 year of age