Well, it’s 5:30 am here in very cold Nanchang! I bet this town is wonderful in the fall and spring, but wow…we caught it in the midst of a cold spell.

Mei and Jen are still asleep. Mei did great last night. She was a bit restless for the first half, but settled down for the rest. We will be getting ready soon so we can eat breakfast and be ready to leave by 8:30 for the trip to the orphanage.

We are very excited about going to the orphanage. I’m a bit nervous, but very excited. It is obvious from looking at Mei that they took great care of her. I hope we get to see her Nannies so they can see how good she is doing and that we are a great family.

Sorry if my post from last night seemed down. I didn’t mean for it to be. It just threw off what we had hoped to do by her going down so early, but like Jen said, if she wants to sleep, we let her sleep, we will worry about a schedule when we get home. She is right.

At the Super Happy Fun Go Go store, we found the cutest clothes in the world. They were very pricey, so we didn’t get them, but we may before we leave. By pricey I mean like $15 to $20. That may not seem like much, but we are trying to watch our funds. We paid all but two fees and have only our meals to pay for in Guangzhou, but I am not sure how easy it will be to access my accounts from here if I need more. I think it will be one of those things where the last day we will go on a spending spree as we will know exactly how much we need.

Due to the weak dollar and inflation, things are more expensive than we were told. There are lots of hidden costs such as tipping your guides and bus drivers and getting your laundry done. I was thinking we had access to a laundry center, like many hotels have where you can wash your clothes yourself. But what we actually have is a service that picks up our dirty and brings back our clean, all for a cost. We had a good bit washed for $15. Things like that just eat away at your money. But the good news is we unloaded almost all our fees to date. That makes me feel better walking around town now!

But, you should’ve seen the cute outfits! Yes, this is Mike writing this…I couldn’t help myself. Something tells me we will be back to buy Mei and Madi matching outfits.

Walking around town is an adventure. Poor Jen gets stared at the most because she is holding Mei. I’m not sure how the average Chinese person feels about Americans coming over to adopt. I guess many of the looks are just out of curiosity. Some of the people we come into contact with, may not see Americans very often, so they stare. The Moore’s have it worse. They both have blond hair and blue eyes and he is probably 6′-2″. They almost got mobbed at Wal-mart by curious onlookers!!!

Mei ate cereal mixed with formula from a spoon yesterday for lunch. That is the first time we have been able to get her to do that. We are thinking she has never had anything but bottles her entire life. A spoon or something in her mouth is just totally foreign to her. So it was good to have her eat from a spoon. We will probably just keep trying.

I’ll write more later.