Bye-Bye Guangzhou, Hello Again Hong Kong (China Day 14)

We've spent our last night of sleep in Guangzhou!  Helen has been fighting sleep big time over the past few days, and it seems to be some sort of coping mechanism.  The poor little thing has been through a lot over the past two weeks, leaving everything she's ever known and being handed over to two complete strangers.  We can't say we blame her for being somewhat emotional.  This morning we went downstairs for our last hotel breakfast buffet, finished most of our packing, and decided to have one last adventure out on the town.  And where do you go when there's nothing else to do?

Yep, Chinese Walmart!  :-)  The Walmart here was about 20 minutes away via taxi, on the lower level of a huge shopping mall.  We entered the building into what must be the Chinese verison of Macy's; a six-story department store called Wanda.  We liked the warnings on the escalator:

After we "pleasa took care of kid", and again "took care of our children" (so important they made rules #3 and #4 on a 2nd sign), we made it out into the mall area and ventured up to the third level of the mall where the "food court" was located.  Hmmm, where to have lunch...  A good ol' US standby?

FruiteLife?  Happy Lemon?  Somewhere that seemingly promises "amorous feelings"?  An organic store ("Natural Is Best", they claim)?

Nah, we settled on this place.  It was pretty much the only place in the mall *without* any English on its name:

We ordered (well, we think we ordered) black pepper chicken, some kind of beef dish, and fried dumplings.    The meals even came with pickled mushrooms (not a fan) and a fruity drink that tasted like Sunny Delight...

Other than the beef being mostly tendons and fat, the food was delicious.  We even ordered a second helping of the fried dumplings, and our total bill was still under $10 US.  We've never had such hot (temperature-wise) dishes served to us in our lives!  Seriously, we would have scalded our hands on the bowl, and it made us sweat just sitting near them.  We ate too much food, but it was really nice to have one last authentic Chinese meal before leaving Guangzhou.  


Then came the moment we were waiting for!

We were greeted by the most popular children's character in China emblazoned onto backpacks, Pleasant Goat.  Side note:  Steve bought a Pleasant Goat DVD, and it's all Chinese with Chinese subtitles.  If anyone in Cedar Rapids wants to come over and watch it, we can talk.

Next we came to the... *ahem*... "fresh" meat portion of the store.  Mmmmm-boy, there's nothing like the smell of freshly deceased fish, squid, and various other animal parts!  Glad we had lunch first.

At this point a manager came out, and we'll just say he "firmly insisted" that Steve put the camera away.  Sorry to say we didn't get any pictures of the huge live frogs, prawns, squid, etc.; nor were we able to get any pictures of housewares, clothing, or other groceries.  Oh well, the dead animal section was definitely the most... interesting.

We finished packing our luggage in the afternoon while Helen protested yet another nap.  We received all of the final adoption paperwork and loaded up the van back to Hong Kong.  It was a little bit cramped, but it definitely beat the train station.  It took us just over three hours to arrive at our hotel, and that included our time at the border customs stop.  The driver handed them our passports & paperwork, they looked us over, took our temperatures with a remote sensor, and we were on our way.

It's 9:30pm right now (we started this post earlier in the afternoon; there's no way we'd have enough energy for all those Walmart pictures as tired as we are now!), and we just scarfed down a bit of Chinese food from a hotel restaurant.  We ate in the hallway to make sure we didn't wake Helen up.  :-)  We can't believe that we're about to go to sleep for the last time in China!  We'll head to the airport first thing in the morning to catch our much-dreaded 15+ hours enroute to Detroit.  HUGE prayer request:  pray that Helen does well on the flight!  Also pray the three of us transition back to Central Time quickly for the sake of the other two kids.  

We're not sure if we'll have the energy to post on our blog right after we return home, but we'll recap our last part of the travel adventure as soon as we can.  Thanks so much to each of you that's followed along with our journey to bring this wonderful little girl home!  The past 15 months have been a whirlwind at times and full of impatience/waiting at other times, but looking back we can see God's hand through it all.  He brought this little girl into this world to be a part of our family.  We are definitely blessed to have three amazing children alongside us for the journey we call life.