Chen Family Temple

Our itinerary for Guangzhou was completely wrong too. We were supposed to go to the Chen Family Temple on Sunday but we went today, Wednesday. Our itinerary also said we had an appointment with the US Consulate. We didn't. Our guide did though. She took all of our paperwork with fees and handled all of the processing. The only thing we have to show up for here is the swearing in which is tomorrow, right before we leave.

This morning we visited the Chen Family Temple. It was a nice structure to look at but I've started to feel like once you've seen one ancient Asian structure, you've seen them all. The girls bored very quickly. Luckily we only there for about 1.5 hours.

After this we went to a park with a famous statue of 5 goats at the top of a hill. We climbed up and took a few pictures. Then the girls were bored again. We thought we'd walk around some but Kaiden was not happy and the girls didn't want to walk much so we headed back to the base of the park to wait for the group to be ready to leave.

We had our usual group of tourists staring at us and wanting to take pictures of the girls. They are good sports about it for the most part and smile for the cameras. After 10 minutes of this, they tired of it so we went to sit on the bus to wait. Keirstyn is getting a taste of what being a 'rockstar' would be like. I think she doesn't like it much and may change her mind about her career aspirations.

Back to the hotel for more free time. We walked around looking for a new place to try for lunch. We heard the German restaurant was good. We walked there and took a look at the menu before sitting down. It was a bit expensive to just try out and it didn't appear that there was much that Pete could eat. I didn't want to waste more money like we did on the Italian restaurant the day before so we went back to Lucy's for a third time. At least we knew what was there and it was our cheapest option outside of fast food.

4 pm was picture time. It is a Chinese adoption tradion that all adopted children from the same agency being adopted at the same time sit on the famous 'red couch' (and there's actually like 8 of them in the same area) and have their picture taken as a group in traditional Chinese outifits. Kaiden fell asleep JUST before they started to do this. Amazingly, he slept right through it! He was the only baby/toddler of the group. I think most of the kids were in the 3 - 6 year old range and Kaiden's only 17 months. The girls dressed up in their Chinese dresses too for a family picture. I wanted to get some shots of them alone but since Kaiden's nap was interrupted and we were all getting hungry, I skipped it. Next time : )

Time for dinner. K's family had visited a Brazilian restuarant on their first trip that they said was wonderful. But we'd have to take taxis. More money. No one really wanted to spend more money and some families still have another full day here. Back to Lucy's. Four times is a charm. Dinner was not so great but the company was fabulous. I wish we had had more time to get to know J & K's families. But, we probably would have killed each other had we had to spend 2 full weeks in a hotel in Beijing. Plus it was fabulous to be able to stay with the M family.