October 21, 2008 Last day in Beijing

We leave at 6:00 am tomorrow for Nanjing!! Nanjing is the capital city of Jiangsu province. We will receive our little man at 2:30 in the afternoon in Nanjing!! Yippee! Tomorrow we get our baby. Today we asked our guide how to say particular names in Chinese. Like mother sounds like MaMa. I think that one is universal. Dad sounds like BaBa. Older brother sounds like gu gu. And, older sister sounds like jia jia. It was fun to say them even though I know we don't say them correctly. We had a lot of fun today. We went to the Summer Palace. It is kind of like a resort place for the emperor in ancient times. It is on the edge of a lake and quite peaceful. The grounds are extensive with gardens and buildings. They just recently opened up the Buddhist temple there. It was just renovated for the Olympics. It was very interesting and the Buddha in the pictures below is the original. Again, we couldn't believe that we were just allowed to roam around and take pictures. It was so interesting . This is the place where one of the emperors was under a kind of house arrest. He was young and his grandmother ran the country behind the "screens" as our guide put it. She had him stay at the Summer Palace and he could not leave. Also, his wife and favorite concubine lived there, but he was not permitted to see them.

Here are some pictures of the Summer Palace.

By the way, you can click on the pictures to make them bigger. After the Summer Palace tour we went to Silk Road. I bet you can imagine what they have there. You got it, silk! and pearls, and name brand clothing and scarves and bags and you name it. It was fun, but I was a little overwhelmed. The shops are in little cubicles and the sales people stand in the aisles and and ask do you want scarf or do you want tie or do you want jacket. The only thing is many of the shops have the same items and all of them are yelling at the same time. If you show any interest they will even walk behind you down the aisle and repeatedly say "hello". I don't know if foreigners use the tactic of walking away to get the price reduced but they evidently think so. Even if we were genuinely uninterested or wanted to shop around they would follow. I learned not to ask "how much" unless I intended to buy. We bought a few things and then decided to head back and pack. We took a taxi with another adopting couple. You stand along a driveway and the taxis pull up alongside. Well, we got in the taxi nearest to us and the driver kept pointing to the taxi in front of us. Evidentally you're supposed to get into the cars in order of who pulled into the drive first. So, we all got out and got into the taxi in front us and off we went. Gives new meaning to the game Chinese fire drill!

When we got back to the hotel I went down to the spa to see if they had any openings. Of course, they did. I was told to get a foot massage from a man named "Michael". Our social worker had one done and recommended him. He was a very funny guy who I believe is blind. His English is excellent and we talked the entire time. He is from an island between Taiwan and Vietnam. It's called Hainan (sp?). He learned how to do Chinese massage at the hospital here. He said that they use Chinese massage to treat many diseases. Since I work in the medical field, of course I was very interested. He said that certain areas of the feet can be linked to other areas in the body. As he was pushing on my feet there were areas that were tender if not painful and every time he would ask "does that hurt". You know what? They did hurt... he was right every time. They don't diagnose illnesses with the feet "thing" but it is a good indicator of diseases. Hmm. I was impressed. He said that in China the physicians use 4 methods to diagnose. 1) Look at the patient 2) Smell the patient 3) Touch the patient and 4) Listen to the patient. Wow! that's a novel ideal.... just listen to their complaint and you learn a lot about them. Anyway very interesting. Aron walked me down and Micheal asked him if he wanted his feet done too and Aron said Nahh. Michael then said, "Well, women love themselves very much!" That was so funny. We do spend a lot of time primping don't we? Well, bye for now. We have to meet our guide at 6:00 am. We'll post as soon as we can. It depends on if AJ takes one look at us and screams his head off or if we can bribe him with cookies. Hey, cookies work for me! We'll see!