I'm combining our third and fourth days into sea of pictures for your enjoyment! It started with a final formality before we visit the US Consulate on Wednesday morning. The dreaded medical appointment! 5 years ago it was a cry fest for us. Lainey needed 8 vaccinations to be allowed into the United States. Two in each limb. Gladly they have changed the rules since then and we had to sign a form stating we will take care of the inoculations that are needed within 30 days of getting home. But we had to start the day with another picture! I guess the systems don't talk to each other in this country and we needed another visa photo. Ridiculous. After several tries our guide was finally able to convince the photographer to give him the camera and he took the photo! Cam just doesn't like to sit long! Then it was off to 3 separate stations, ENT, height and weight, and general conditions. That all went pretty smoothly. The funniest part of the whole morning? The wine vending machine on the way out of the medical building! You could buy full bottles from a machine!
I guess they figured its a ripe market for booze after the medical stop!
While Christina was at the medical with Cam I took Lainey to the kids playground here at the hotel. Some little swings and slides around a waterfall made for a fun setting to blow off some energy.
In the evening it was dinner on the Pearl River! We went on a replica old sailing boat. The river at night comes alive with lights and other boats sailing for dinner cruises. We could bring our own food so the guides took our orders from Papa John's! Its a pretty neat trip. Just about two hours but lots to look at. The Guandong Tower lights up in all sorts of colors and is 2000 feet tall. There are three other financial buildings making the top 20 tallest in the world in the world here too! All lit up and pretty spectacular to see at night.
They had a very detailed tea ceremony that the girls were pretty fascinated to watch. I was surprised Lainey and a couple others sat there intently for 10 minutes watching every sculpted traditional move.
Do you know some of the many ways to test pearls to see if they are real? Well our intrepid guides shed some light on the methods today as we ventured to the Pearl Market. Some sales people will take scissors and show how some of the pearl will scratch off when real. If its rough when you rub it against your tooth and not smooth its real, and they might even run the pearls through the flame of a lighter to show it doesn't crack like glass would. Saw that example today. We ventured to the same jewelry mall and same shop we visited last time. Hua Mei Pearls. Still hard to fathom for me a mall six stories high with all kinds of back corridors leading away to other stores and all they sell is beads. EVERY store. This store has all blue beads, only blue. The next has just shades of yellow. The next is all costume jewelry. There are just bags of beads laying in the halls, ripe for just picking one up and throwing over your shoulder and walking away like Santa with a bag of toys! The stores are usually just wholesale but there are a couple that work with our guides and understand they have a new group of families coming in from the U.S. weekly that will jump at the chance to buy pearls for 1/4 the price we would pay at home. They know some people might be shopping for a while too so they have couches to sit on in the halls and toys for the kids! Its an interesting sight as women shop, dads and kids are in the hall trying to pass the time. One couch had certainly seen better days. Reminded me of a porch couch from a college frat house. Seems when someone throws stuff away here they just put it somewhere that another person will say hey I can use that and take it! I thought we were to get a bracelet for a gift long down the road for Cam's future wife! Didn't make it out so lucky!
I guess if you are a buyer for Macy's you come here and order all the jewelry your stores will sell for the entire year. That's the only way to fathom how this place works. Just outside of the jewelry center is a shopping strip. Think Times Square with only foot traffic. Large flashing signs and digital bill boards galore. People even more numerous. And stares at the Americans taking pictures from the center and trying to decide to eat at the McDonalds on the right or left side of the square!
The panorama came out pretty slick. I love the guys looking at us like who in the world are these people? That was a 180 degree view of the shopping square. I wish I had the guts to see what it looked like at night there all lit up! But our guides were very cautious about us watching our belongings just in the day so a night visit isn't going to happen. I'll leave with two pictures and a story. When we got back to the hotel today, Christina's dad had a present waiting in his room. A birthday cake and card from the hotel manager! Pretty neat! Except his birthday is Feb 20 not Jan 20! We guess they took it from the passport you need at check in and just got the date wrong. But it was a pretty yummy mango cheesecake we believe. A nice after dinner desert. The perks of 5 star hotels I guess! The last picture of Cameron needs no explanation!
I had to scroll to the end to see that picture first:) Absolutely precious!!!!
ReplyDelete