Long Flights and Little Brothers

I'll try to catch everyone up on our trip so far.  The flight was the easiest international flight I've taken.  We flew out of Las Vegas at midnight, and, as a result, slept for about half of the longest leg of the journey.  We breezed through customs and immigration and as we walked out of the airport were met with a throng of people all holding up signs and yelling.  We found a sign with our name on it and went with our guide, Bob, a jovial man probably in his mid-twenties who learned English by watching TV--Friends and Desperate Housewives are his two favorites.

Our hotel is above a pedestrian thoroughfare called Up and Down Number Nine Street, and after we checked in, we wandered through the shops.  Guangzhou City is home to thirteen million people, and to a gal from rural Southern Utah, (The entire state of Utah has a population of not quite three million) it seemed like nearly all of them were on the thoroughfare that evening.  I forget how much my family--two Anglo women and two Chinese girls--stands out here.  People are intensely and openly curious about us and point, stare and converse about us.  Last night, we ate at the Guangzhou Restaurant which is right across the street from our hotel, and at one point we had four members of the waitstaff standing about ten feet away from our table all ogling us, pointing and laughing.  We are a novelty for sure!

Anyway, we wandered the shops, ate food from street vendors--strawberries skewered and dipped in boiling sugar syrup, fish ball, and corn on the cob.  They were all pretty tasty, but I'm sure the corn had been dried and reconstituted.  It was chewy.  We forewent the squid on a stick, sweet and sour water snakes, and something that I'm nearly certain involved entrails.

We met Asa yesterday afternoon at the Civil Affairs office.  Every single picture I have of Asa up to this point shows a sad, forlorn little boy, so I wasn't expecting the boy that walked over to me with the Cars backpack that I'd sent and some kind of mangled treat in his hands.  We sat on the floor, and I started blowing bubbles that I'd brought with me.  Yeah, they were a huge hit!  He first smiled and tried to pop them and progressed quickly to full-on belly laughs within probably five minutes of meeting him.  The orphanage worker told me that he's very smart, outgoing, happy, and everyone who meets him loves him.  That's for sure!  He's charming, busy and mischievous to the core!  He also speaks both Cantonese and Mandarin and not a word of English.  When I asked what kind of food he preferred, they said candy.  They're not kidding there; he absconded with his treat bag that was supposed to last for the whole trip and started going down on the more sugary bits.  He also put the hurt to a foot-long piece of sugar cane.  He did eat eggs, rice and veggies for dinner though.

By the time the day was over yesterday, he was testing his boundaries pretty seriously.  (That couldn't have had anything to do with the amount of sugar he consumed.)  He threw his chopsticks (which he uses fairly proficiently) across the restaurant and pitched a screaming, kicking, no-holds-barred fit on the sidewalk of the pedestrian street when I wouldn't let him bring home a yapping electronic dog with glowing eyes from one of the shops.  Yes, people stared.  A lot.  It's all good; we are pros at being intensely examined by now.

Now he's asleep in bed.  It's 6:40 a.m. here right now, 4:40 p.m. MST.  Today we complete the adoption--I fork over some more money, sign some papers, and he is no longer a ward of the Chinese government but a Davis instead.  Yeah, that paperwork was definitely worth it!

(More pictures later.  We're having some downloading issues.)