Thursday January 27, 2011

Today we had a free day.  The weather was beautiful, we walked for hours.  Molly took us to the Qing Ping Market on the other side of the freeway.  It has a medical market section with everything you can imagine: roots, barks, scorpions (live), dried seahorses, starfish, nuts everything.  Matthew was so excited to see a live scorpion with its stinger still on.  Then we walked through the pet section and on to the clothing mall.  A lot of the stores are closed because the Chinese New Year celebration begins on Sunday and the shopkeepers have gone home for the holidays.  We stopped by Lucy's Restaurant for lunch & it was so nice we ate outside with our coats off. After naptime we did some souvenir shopping and Nikki had her first bite of ice cream.  She wasn't sure about it at first but she seemed to like it.  After supper we are going to take the traditional White Swan red couch picture.  It is tradition for adopting families to take a picture of their children on the red couch here in the hotel. If we were part of a group traveling together we would take the picture with lots of kids.

Tomorrow afternoon we can get Nikki's visa to enter the US and then drive to Hong Kong.