We are now in Hefei! Uneventful flight. It's raining, and has been for awhile. The guide thinks it will continue for a few days. She says that it's their rainy season here. We are the only parents she is helping in Hefei. Since it is raining, and the Civil Affairs Office has something important going on there tomorrow; Kaleb will be brought to our hotel room tomorrow morning at 9:30 a.m.
Christina (our guide) suggested that we have candy and toys to give him, since he will probably be crying, "because we don't look very Chinese". We're getting pretty used to that. When we were touring Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City in Beijing, we had several people stop and want to get their pictures taken with us (well, me - but then David too). The other parents in our group said that the next time it happened, they were going to take pictures of the people taking pictures of us. Evidently the darker hair color that I tried out didn't last very long, I'm pretty much blonde again.
In other news, David has been able to access a language menu on this hotel's TV, so we can actually understand what is on TV again! Unfortunately I think the difference in electrical connections may have fried my curling iron. It's not heating up anymore, even though we were using an adapter. We may head to the local mall later and get supper and find some candy for Kaleb and a curling iron for me.
They just brought a crib and a stroller to our room. David thinks the crib is circa 1949 :) It doesn't look like it would hold anyone older than a couple of months old - sturdiness-wise. Maybe kids sleep differently around here. My guess is that he will probably be sleeping with us in the King Size bed.
I realized that I didn't respond to all of your questions. Jet lag doesn't seem to be a problem so far. We did wake up about 2:00 last night, but we fell asleep again pretty quickly. Maybe something loud happened in traffic outside the hotel. Traffic isn't quite as bad as I was expecting, but I had heard it was pretty crazy. There doesn't seem to be much leeway for pedestrians - it looks like cars have the 'right of way' and people know it.
From a later email:
We ventured out this afternoon to find candy for Kaleb and returned victorious - hope he likes it. While we were at the store we actually saw a witch 'doll' with blondish hair. I noticed that she had a wart on her nose though, and didn't look a thing like me. :) The curling iron at this particular store was about $35 U.S. (as opposed to Chinese money), so we'll look at the Wal-Mart place tomorrow. I'm so glad that dad can do the money conversions in his head! It has been freaking us out a bit, when we see huge numbers on things such as lollypops. We know that can't be right. So we decide how much we think it should be, and that we won't buy it if it they ask us for more money at the checkout counter. It turns out that the price was 'per pound', and was about what we thought it should cost. This seemed like a 'regular' store with regular prices, and I didn't see any customers bargaining at the checkout counter. So we think we were doing things OK.
This particular store is only about a half a block from the hotel and it has about everything you could think of in it. The bottom floor of the store looks like a Macy's. When you walk in it has a perfume / jewelry section. But there is a grocery store section towards the back of the store. Then there are several other floors with clothing, appliances, a kid play area (looked like you needed to pay for it though) and a KFC. So that's where we went for supper. We were confused at first because we couldn't find a counter to order food, although we could see people eating. It turns out we were on the second floor of the KFC, and we needed to go down a level. They were all very helpful, but didn't understand us much better than we understood them. They handed us a menu with pictures from which we could point at what we wanted. Unfortunately, they didn't give us drinks - so we didn't communicate that very well (even though we pointed to the pop and David made drinking motions). We also thought we were getting 2 two-piece chicken meals. But we ended up with two bags that had one piece of chicken each and that was all. So we went back downstairs to the grocery section and found potato chips that were 'potato flavored' as opposed to sweet & spicy, or barbeque, or something else. So ends David & Ann's Great Adventure for today. Tomorrow our REALLY Great Adventure begins!
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