Some Pictures from Sunday

Waking the Dead: Abigail is not a morning person.

After we attended the service at Shamien Christ Church, we had lunch in our room. Abigail has instant noodles, we have bread and jam and peanut butter.

After lunch, we went to the open air market across the Pearl River. This is a network of streets and narrow alleys where you can buy pretty much everything.

A closer view of a few of the shops.

The nearest I can guess what these are is dried flying squirrel.

Abigail liked all the puppies that were for sale.

A large mall near the market. There must have been 20,000 people in the square outside this mall.

Shamien Island, where our hotel (the Victory Hotel) is located, is in kind of a bubble. It is an oasis inside a crowded and busy city. There are several weddings a day which take place here amongst the palm trees and courtyards. This is an island by virtue of a section of the river which surrounds it, actually, more like a moat. Life on the island is sort of slow and dreamy, while the real China bustles all around. Cross the moat, and it's an entirely different world.

Another part of the bubble we are living in right now is the weather. It was in the low 80's yesterday, around 85 degrees today, with more of the same for the rest of our time here, maybe cooling into the upper 70's. I hear it's cold and even snowy at home. So I will say this while I can, before I, too, join the ranks of the snowbound:

Nya, nya!

We met up with three other families from our agency in Guangzhou. This evening, we went out to dinner with two of them. Abigail, Kamryn, and Michael [not pictured] spent the evening chatting with each other in Chinese. I think it was nice for them to be able to talk with someone they can understand. It was sort of a fancier Italian restaurant, and the kids were all very good until just before we left, when they began to get louder and louder, having a debate about numbers and hand signs for the numbers.

After we left the restaurant, we stood by the side of the Pearl River for a while and watched the lights. Guangzhou lights up at night and the view along the Pearl River is amazing. We will be taking a cruise along the river on Wednesday, so we will get a front row view of the lights on the shoreline at that time.