Day 14 and 15 - June 13 and 14, 2007

OK, I'm starting off by posting the pictures from the medical exam yesterday. I was in a hurry to go catch the boat for our river cruise and ran out of time.

Wednesdays post - Today was our Consulate Appointment. Todd and I only had to sit in our room while our guide, David, ran over to the American Consulate with all of our paperwork. He then did all the hard work, while we played with Micah in our room. We were quite relieved to get his call letting us know that everything had worked out just fine.

Next it was out to SHOP!!!!!! Todd just loves to shop :) OK, I love to shop. He loves to bargain with the shopkeepers. It works out quite nicely. Now, how on EARTH will we get all this stuff home??

Last for the day was a river boat cruise. We ordered Papa John's pizza to take with us. It was a very nice couple of hours going up and down the river and seeing all of the buildings. It is amazing seeing the small, run-down older buildings tucked in among the huge, new skyscrapers. David says that when he was young (20 years ago) he would ride his bike through the fields to get to downtown Guangzhou. Now those fields are the huge skyscrapers. Kind of sad, but progress keeps on going. The last picture is of our hotel - The White Swan.

Post for Thursday - Today had two main events. The first was the attempt at packing all of our stuff into the bags that we brought with us. It was not a success. We will be heading out to buy a new suitcase as soon as I finish this blog.

The second event was the taking of the traditional adoption picture on the red couch in the White Swan. It is normally a picture of all the babies in your travel group. However, since we did not get to travel with a group, we contacted the other family that is here who got their little girl from Micah's SWI. They came over this afternoon, and I swear the kids recognized each other. Micah saw Anna and was all smiles. He crawled over to her and started touching her, smiling, laughing, flirting like a big boy! They were both really happy to see each other, so the photo session was a total success!!

Ok, so we really had three big events today. Probably the most important was our trip to the American Consulate where Todd and I got to take our oaths. Micah slept through most of it, but woke up just in time for the actual oath-taking. When we finished, he looked in my face and started laughing. Probably because I was starting to get all teary-eyed. That's why Todd was laughing, at any rate :) We got the legendary sealed brown envelope which contains all kinds of important paperwork that we have to give to the immigrations people when we get back to the good old US of A, and Micah's Chinese passport (I am posting a picture of him with it - it's a little red booklet).