11-27-09 Golden Temple and plane to Guangzhou

Today we visited the Golden Temple, it is a neat temple up in the hills/mountain that is completely cast out of copper. Supposedly this area is known for its copper and used for a lot of the money in old China. Well one year there was a war and they couldn't transport the copper safely and so the governor of the area had a temple built/cast out of copper to help end the war and to bring prosperity back to the area. When it was brand new it looked like gold and so it was called the Golden Temple. Now it is very tarnished and black but they have gold plated some parts and some of it has been cleaned to give it a golden look. Both girls slept through the whole tour and we had them in strollers so we had to carry the strollers up and down all of the stairs.

Just like in the states the day after Thanksgiving all of the Christmas decorations go up as you can see the large Christmas tree in our hotel lobby.

Later in the afternoon we went to the airport and caught our flight to Guangzhou. We attracted a large crowd of onlookers trying to figure out if the girls are twins and if they are Chinese or not. We found some really interesting fruit as you can see in the pic above and almost bought one just to see what it tasted like. We didn't because we didn't want to carry more stuff.

We were very happy to get to Guangzhou, but it is very humid and hot here. Our hotel room is nice, we got a suite in the Victory West Annex so that the girls could run and play. And that's exactly what they did when we got here, they were bouncing off the walls! They had so much energy and had a great time. They did sleep well which was nice for us.

We are Thankfull for.......

All of our wonderful kids!!!!!

11-26-09 Thanksgiving Day

Today we had a free day, meaning no planned activities. So we started off with a little shopping (for shoes, what else!) Then Jodie was gracious enough to let Brian go golfing again, so he headed off to Spring City Golf Course. It is about an hour away in the mountains on the side of a large lake. Last time I played the Lake Course and so this time I played the other course there called the Mountain Course designed by Greg Norman. It was more challenging than the Lake Course and I really enjoyed it. The greens were really quick and they had a lot of slopes and levels to them. This time I had a caddie that spoke very good English. It was quite enjoyable to play with her, she would tell me where to hit and where to put it to. She was very good at reading the greens. I had planned on only playing 9 holes so that I wouldn't be away from Jodie and the girls too long but it only took me an hour and 15 minutes to play 9 holes so I went ahead and played another 9 holes, this time choosing the back nine of the Lake Course. It is much more scenic and enjoyable to play. My caddie said that I shot an 86 out of a par 72, but she kinda cheated for me and didn't count all of the strokes, It's one of the few times I would have broken 90. I would imagine I shot right at 90 or 91. I was driving the ball so well and putting well too. I had a great time and made it back in time to go to dinner with Jodie and the girls.

Jodie hung out in the room with the girls, packed the suitcases for our flight tomorrow and did some laundry. She didn't want to venture out with two little girls in a strange city. Once Brian got home we all went out for our Thanksgiving Dinner. Since Indian food is one of our favorite foods, we went and got Indian food. It was delicious!!!! The waitress gave our girls some balloons which helped to occupy them while we ate. After that we walked around the roads of Kunming looking for some more shoes. We finally found the ones Jodie was looking for and then stopped at KFC for some Sundaes and french fries. The girls had a great time playing on the slide there.

After that we headed to the hotel, put the girls in jammies and let them watch Barney (Meigan has an obsession with Barney, the purple dinosaur).

A special video!

11-25-09 Lunch, shopping & Dinner

After the park we went to an official Jade Market and bought Melin a jade bracelet for when she gets older then we had our driver drop us off at the downtown shopping district and we had lunch at Pizza Hut, (the waitresses were all dressed up for Christmas) and then had ice cream at McDonald's afterwards and let the girls play on a Giant Shoe for toddlers. Meilin is not a fan of western food, didn't like the pizza, or the ice cream so we bought her some mashed potatoes at KFC. We then took a taxi home and put the girls down for a nap.

There is a young lady that works at the front desk that speaks really good English and has helped us several times, her name is Sarah. We were talking with her the other day, asking her where to eat and we said maybe we could go out for dinner one night. So after the girls naps she took us to a Hot Pot restaurant. A Hot Pot is where they have a large pot with boiling water and two sections, one spicy and one not. We had tofu, beef, chicken, stomach, shrimp, spinach, mushrooms, mint, and potato. They dump everything in and let it cook in the boiling water and then you did in your chop sticks and pull out what you want. It was very good. Brian ate something that was way spicy and burned his mouth pretty good, which is saying something as usually it can't be spicy enough for him. Jodie had no problem with it though and thoroughly enjoyed the tofu and vegetables. The girls were a living terror at dinner, running around being noisy and basically being two year olds. Luckily Sarah had reserved a private room for us on the third floor and so it was easy to control them. On the first floor there was a buffet you could do that was very unique. There was a channel of water that circulated throughout the floor, and they would put the food on floating dishes and they would travel throughout the restaurant and you would just lean over from your table and grab what you wanted. It was really cool!!!