Another shopping day (aka. Organized outing). Trust us when we say we are mostly going to look and we have purchased very little. All our money has vanished somewhere in Barrett's orphanage and government buildings across Beijing and Guangzhou.
The tour bus took us to Shamian island that is very old and historically built with French architecture influence. Very much like the look of Savannah, GA. Apparently we hit the day where a major fashion and product photo shoot was taking place. It was fun watching a male model in a suit pose himself a hundred different ways to sell the watch on his wrist.
Erin and Denise shopped together (since they were mostly looking for the same items) while the daddies followed behind with the cranky hot kids:) erin purchased a chop stamp for Barrett and Bradford (a stamp with their name in English and Chinese), a small Christmas ornament and a map puzzle of china. We've been trying to buy little but meaningful items to give him on gotcha day each year until he is 18. After two shops, we had lunch with the Walkers at Lucy's Cafe and then picked up our chop stamps that were being carved. Its been great having the Walkers here the same time. Denise has helped Erin understand more about attachment and bonding because she has walked through this once already. The last thing Erin insisted we do before leaving the island was take Barrett's picture by the little statues. We had a feeling that was going to go over like a lead balloon. He cried for a second and then realized it wasn't so scary. He did study them for a while. I guess from his perspective it looks a bit odd to see children his size frozen solid.
Since we elected to get his picture taken late in the trip, we purposely let the bus go without us and took our first Chinese cab back to the hotel. To cap the night off... We had Mexican food at a local restaurant with two other families one of which was the Kendrick's. Stephen Kendrick is the producer for all the Christian theatrical films Sherwood Baptist Church makes (Fireproof, Courageous, facing the Giants). It was great to get to know him more and talk shop about editing. Barrett had been up from 7am to 8pm without sleep, something we will not purposefully do again, at least here in China.
RSS Feed