We took a trip to the Guangdong Provincial Museum, which has exhibits including Guangdong History and Culture, Chaozhou Gilded Woodcarvings, Natural Resources, Ceramics, and Duan Inkstones. The museum includes items such as calligraphy, paintings, ceramics, woodcarvings, and gemstones. Right in the middle of the museum tour Lucille decided to start being giggly and silly and.......wait for it.........talkative!!! She was letting Daddy tickle her and repeating words for us!! She said "Mama, Baba (Daddy), Ella, no, and good girl!" At one point Ella and Heather were looking for Steve and saying, "where's Baba?" Suddenly Lucille pointed the other direction and said, "DA BABA! (there's Baba)" all on her own. She was a silly, giggly, and chatty girl on the entire bus ride back to the hotel.
She still is not a fan of anyone else holding her besides Heather, and she refuses to ride in the stroller. This means Heather has to carry her everywhere, and it is incredibly hot and humid here. We're trying to find creative ways to allow her to open up to Steve more and more, hence leaving them alone at breakfast. Whenever she needs help opening something we make her bring it to Baba to help her, and he offers her food at every meal. She actually let him hold her today because she was screaming in the stroller and he offered to pick her up. We'll count that as progress!
We ate lunch in our room and decided to take a taxi to a wholesale toy mall we remembered visiting last year. The concierge desk has cards with several common destinations written out in Chinese and English that we can show to the drivers to communicate where we want to go. We grabbed one, showed a taxi driver and off we went. 15 minutes later we arrived at a mall, went in, walked around for 10 or so minutes, and realized this was not the right place. We had wanted to go to One Link Plaza, but we ended up at One Link Center! We went back out into the stifling humidity and managed to grab another taxi. We showed him the card and off we went again. 20 minutes later he pulled up to a place we did not recognize. We shook our heads and told him "no!" We showed him the card again and discovered he had read the line below where we were pointing and took us to the wrong place. So, after taking 4x as long and costing 4x as much as we thought it would, we finally ended up at the toy mall :) In the taxi Heather told Ella that in China everything is an adventure, and she pinky-promised that the mall would be worth it. And it was.
In her silliness, Lucille has been testing some boundaries so we have been having to teach her what is appropriate and what isn't. She sometimes hits us (trying to be funny, not in anger) and tries to touch things she shouldn't. She now knows and repeats the word "nice" while gently touching our arm or face. At one point today the girls were being goofy and Ella was totally encouraging Lucille's craziness. Heather remarked, "Lucille and Ella are acting like sisters!" It was so extremely fun to see.
We got back quite late so Steve ran down the street to grab us some Pizza Hut! He thought a medium might be sufficient for the four of us, but turns out a medium here in China is completely different from a medium in the US. It's more like a personal-pan size! So we ate our pizza "appetizer" plus some other stuff we had around the room.
That about wraps things up for today! Lucille is sound asleep and the rest of us are going to get ready for bed.
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