Day 8

Still feeling a bit rough today. In our adoption group, there is a doctor who offered me some antbiotics last night. I think I will take her up on it. I'm worried I've got one of those upper respiratory infections I'm famous for brewing. Eddie still wretches at even the smell of food - so I'm a bit worried about him too though now he's happily playing one of the 70+ games cousin William got him for his Nintendo . He hasn't eaten more than a couple bites like twice a day since last Monday. I think he may have some stomach bug. Boy, I'm just praying we can keep it together til this Friday, then Saturday, we're on our way back to the good ol US of A.

Today was tour a temple, do some shopping day. I asked Bill to go without us (can you all imagine Bill at a temple), which I'm glad he did. He took the camera so hopefully will get some good pics for me to post later. The rest of our week looks like:

Tues (tomorrow): Go to hospital for medical examination for baby. Let's hope Eddie and I won't have to hang out for medical treatment for ourselves!

Wednesday: Der and Helen are taking the group for shopping in the morning, then Der has arranged for his friend a jeweler to come to the hotel with some pearl necklaces for us to purchase. Cousin William is coming to meet us and take us to do some shopping so I think we'll go with cousin on our own. We were supposed to go with him yesterday to do some touring but it was raining pretty hard, so we didn't go. Good thing, as bad as I was feeling, just needed a day go nowhere, do nothing and relax.

Thursday: We're to stay in our rooms from 9:30 am - 10:30 am in case Der and Helen have any problems with our visa applications and/or have any questions. Then there's a big meeting with them in their room at 11 am and at 12 noon, a group picture of all of us and our babies, then at 6 pm a dinner boat cruise which I hope we can go to. It sounds like fun. That'll be a big day, so I'll have to rest up for it.

Friday: We leave the hotel at 2:45 pm for the US Consulate for our interviews. This is the immigration part, where we petition and seek permission to bring Isabella back to the States with us. We had pre-applied and have already been approved, so hopefully its just a formality of filing the paperwork and the US getting $380 from us and nothing goes wrong. She is a Chinese citizen with a Chinese passport, but will enter the US with us with a special visa. Once she gets past the immigration border in Newark, she will be a naturalized US citizen. I think we do have to do some paperwork after returning to the States to get her a US birth certificate. Assuming all goes well at the Consulate, we depart Guangzhou on a bus afterwards for Hong Kong (another 3 hr bus ride). I was surprised that even though HK is back under Chinese rule (since 1997) that there are still border, entry, exit, immigration borders to go through. Coming into GZ there were 2 borders. Our HK guide said it was to keep control of the numbers passing to HK. If even a fraction of 1.3 billion people in China went to HK, the island would sink. I did some checking on google. There are only 6.6 billion people in the world, which means the Chinese in China alone represents just under 20% of the world's population. According to the US Census Bureau, the US has 302,767,461 people as of the 2000 census. In other words 1 out of every 5 people in the world live in China. Check out this site for more data on China's population http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/china/geog/population.htm

Saturday: We're heading home! This place is beautiful and magnificent, but there is truly no place like home. Having a child is hard. Having one in a foreign land, where you're not used to the food, surroundings, language and cultural barriers, is like nothing I can even begin to describe. I'm still glad we did this, but boy oh boy...