Sunday, June 28 - At the Museum

We met up with four other families from Wacap (our adoption agency) that are here in Guangzhou for their visa appointments this week.  We went in a bus, with our guide Elsie, to a museum from 9:30 to about noon.  One of the families has a daughter that they adopted from the same orphanage as Ezekiel, so it was fun to meet them in person!  I'd already talked to them on a Facebook group, so it sort of felt like we knew each other already.  They have been here in China since June 12, so they are really ready to go home later this week!  They're in the same boat as us, like I talked about yesterday, with needing to stay longer for the passport processing.  The other three families have been in China for about a week (since about the same time that we got here) but they will be leaving this week.  So we'll probably get to tag along with any sightseeing excursions that are going on first with this group, and then next week there will be a new group of families from Wacap that we can tag along with.  Anyway, we went to the museum and it was actually pretty fun.  It's fun to have TongJie along, especially since he's old enough now to be interested in stuff like that.  We saw the historical part of the museum first, and that was pretty neat.  TongJie was sure that there would be trains at this museum, but I kept telling him I didn't think we would see any.  We did not see any trains, but there was one old photograph that had train tracks in it, so that was enough to make him happy.  Next we went to the natural science part of the museum and that was really cool.  TongJie was wishing that his cousin Levi was there because Levi is really into animals and rocks and things and there were lots of cool displays.  By the time we got through that section, it was getting close to lunch time and many of the kids (including Ezekiel) were beginning to lose it.  We took a little break so kids could go to the bathroom and get snacks, and then went on to the pottery section, which may have been neat if Ezekiel wasn't crying and everybody wasn't tired and hungry, but as it was, we could have done without seeing the pottery.  Both TongJie and Ezekiel fell asleep on the way back to the hotel, then we put Ezekiel into his crib for a nap and the rest of us had lunch and TongJie is playing more or less quietly.  We're planning to go to the good old Trust Mart (kind of like Walmart) in a little while, and then go swimming with all of us together.  TongJie and Jeff checked out the pool already this morning before our museum excursion and they said it's really fun!  Jeff says it's way more kid-friendly than the pool at our last hotel, so I'm predicting we'll probably be spending a lot of time there over the next several days.