Our first sighting of Joseph from the 5th floor window of the Civil Affairs Office as he got out of the car.
Our first encounter. He was very reserved, but you wouldn't know it now!
Joseph feeling more at ease.
Part of the Pizza Hut menu. We had fried calamari as our appetizer. Joseph loved it!
We are all exhausted and Steve is sick. Please pray for healing for
him quickly! We have an early appointment so we'll try to post
pictures to see your Wednesday night late.
(This is Jarrett posting for the Jackson's)- I know you really want to see some
pictures so I snapped this when I talked to them on SKYPE
So, this is what color the carpet used to be! Yikes, not walking barefoot here!
There was a Christian Dior fashion shoot across from our hotel. You should have seen the number of cabs stopped to check out the beauties.
It is quite obvious that they are not used to seeing many foreigners here. It is very unlike Beijing and Guangzhou where we spent most of our time last year with May Lee. Even in the hotel we can't find anyone that can speak English, other than the occasional "Hello." We finally realized why everyone was staring at our shoes, we think it is actually at our legs, as we have all had on shorts. They don't wear shorts here. We walked with the Stevens (from Chicago), the other family adopting from this province, to find a restaurant for lunch.
On our second try we found a place with a picture menu, and some dishes were even in English!! Of course no one spoke a lick of it, but we managed. We refrained from the braised donkey meat or the fragrant skin jelly, but ordered what we think was a chicken dish and the other dish, well, all we knew was it had peanuts in it. They were pretty good. The food we ordered did not have English labels and we couldn't find any pictures of rice or noodles, so that was quite commical trying to order that.
We went to the Gongshuzi Temple, an ancient temple from the Ting Dynasty. It is a Buddhist temple, but not active anymore to worship, but they still come and bow to Buddha and leave incense and fruit offerings.
Wassuuuup?
This Cypress tree is 3,000 years old. We were wanting to count the rings to see if this was really true... but we didn't have a chain saw handy.
This place give great power. The muscles are strong in this one.
We went to a really nice restaurant for dinner. Though you walk in and you see tanks full of various fish, turtles, crab, etc. We wanted to order the crab, but he got away. It was quite entertaining watching the girls try to catch the runaway crab. He was quite quick! Our guide was with us and ordered our dinner for us. It was a beautiful presentation, then you taste the "chicken", and it wasn't so beautiful anymore. I think it was more like chicken knuckle.
Everything else was pretty good though.
Our dinner escaped!
We ate dinner in this beautiful restaurant.
We are so excited about getting Joseph!! We leave in a few hours to meet him at the civil affairs office. It will be about 2:00 in the morning your Wednesday when we get him, so by the time you probably get this he will be with us FINALLY!!!!!
