Day 8 - June 7, 2007

Guessing game for the day. Who can guess what I ate for breakfast? The breakfast buffet here at the White Swan is impressive. I have never seen so much food. They cater to the Chinese, American, and European traveller. Whatever you could possible want, they have. Just to let you know - the little prickly balls are called Lichi fruit, and they are delicious. The top yellow kidney shaped one is a little tiny mango - I think I will eat about 5 of those today. The star shaped one is actually from Todd's plate, so I didn't tast it. I put a banana on so you could have one easy one :) FYI - I also had a ham, tomato, green/yellow pepper, mushroom and cheese omelet, 3 pieces of bacon, 2 glasses of orange juice, and a cranberry/yogurt parfait kind of thing.

Two big events today - the first was Micah "playing" with us. He would sit and look at the pins. Then he would reach out with either one finger or his foot and knock them over while Todd and I made silly noises. The first couple times he looked at us like we were nuts. Then he just took it for granted that we would whoop and holler while he calmly pushed them over again and again. Progress, progress.

Today's sight-seeing took us to the Chen Family Temple. Evidently, each family, or clan, has its own place of worship. I'm pretty sure they had other business transactions take place there as well, but our guide was talking to Todd at the time and I missed it. This place was beautiful - as everyplace has been so far. I am still amazed at the work they put into decorating - on the roof, wood screens, statues, gardens, everything! I am attaching a few miscellaneous pictures for you to see. By the way, kids, if Jackie Chan lived here in Guangzhou, this would be his family temple. Another by the way, Foshan (where Micah is from) is famous for its ceramics. Peter, this is the only snake I have seen so far - I hope this picture of a ceramic snake is to your liking.
Our next stop was a wholesale market place. We dined on some incredibly exotic food here - Kentucky Fried Chicken! After all of the different foods we have been eating, it was nice to have a little taste of home. We looked around at so many different shops - turquoise, pearls, jade, clothing, CD/DVDs, it was almost more than I could take in. How does anybody know where to go?

And finally, the biggest event of the day. Micah was ravenously hungry after all of the shopping, so I got out a bottle and set it on the bed just out of his reach. He finally crawled about 3 feet! It wasn't a very good crawl, but it was definitely up on his hands and knees and CRAWLING! Todd was on cloud 9. So was I. Micah didn't care - he just wanted his bottle.