Yuexiui Park and 6 Banyans Temple

Today we ventured out to see Guangzhou with three other families from our agency. It was nice to finally be part of a group in touring around and to actually have to take a bus to fit everyone. Although having the guide exclusively to ourselves in previous cities was nice, it was fun this time to talk to other families going through the same adoption process while we rode the bus. We first visited Yuexiui Park. This park has a famous statue in Guangzhou depicting 5 goats. The story of the goats says that five gods riding on five goats brought the first rice leaves to the city so the people would never go hungry. It is the reason Guangzhou is sometimes referred to as Goat City. Also an interesting side note Guangzhou - although small in comparison to other cities in China is a city of 3.2 million people and serves as an important center of foreign commerce helped by it's proximity to Hong Kong.

While in the park Kyle and I played some hackysack with the locals. Simon, our guide approached a group and opened the door so we could play with them. Their version of hackysack is some rubber and metal disks with feathers sticking out the top. You kick it in the air between people like you would a hackysack in the U.S. - but it is much more popular in parks in China. We saw women and men of all ages playing it. Especially the retired people were playing it. Our guide pointed out that the normal retirement age in China is 50 and we saw many retirees playing hacksack, dancing and exercising throughout the park.

After this we took the bus to the 6 Banyans Buddhist Temple. Although they were performing another ceremony so we could not do a blessing for our babies - something which is a tradition for adoptive families - we still got to see the temple and experience the monks chanting. They were having a service to celebrate the birthday of one of the Buddha's. There are three Buddha's - past, present and future in the Temple - they are around 2 - 3 stories high and all three sit in the temple.

Throughout the day Jia Lu was very animated and seems to enjoy any activity we do. She is continuing to try to walk more and more. We think soon she will be walking on her own once she gets strong enough. She definitely wants to try to walk a lot more now than when we first met her - it's very exciting !