Diaper Rats and Hockey Sex

I wish I had been keeping track of all the cute ways we've heard different things pronounced by our Chinese guides. My favs so far are diaper rash and hackey sac. If I can remember some of the others I'll be sure to post.

Today we woke up and pinched ourselves . . . not a dream, we really are here in Guangzhou! Pizza, chicken nuggets and french toast with syrup some of the many many choices at the breakfast buffet. The restaurant overlooks the Pearl River, and while not the most picturesque, it certainly beat the ambiance at the Gloria Grand in Nanchang.

After a lovely breakfast, we loaded up for some sightseeing. We went to the Guangzhou Museum to learn a little about the history of the city. We learned that if you want to say "good" in Cantonese you say "oh". Very good is oh oh. And excellent is . . . oh oh oh. I think perhaps this is one Chinese language I could learn.


Part of the museum complex is a park that works it's way up a hill to a statue of 5 goats (there is a legend about the founding of the area that involves fairies bringing the goats, with corn in their mouths and then the fairies left, leaving the prosperous goats and their corn . . . Guangzhou means goat city)









In the park are several terraced areas where people enjoy ballroom dancing and play a game like hackey sac, although instead of using sacs, they use feathers attached to a stack of small metal discs. We saw this being done in BJ but actually got to give it a try here in Goat City.





After bargaining rather aggressively for our own little feather toys, we loaded up and headed to the Guangzhou Pearl Market, ready to get to some serious bargaining business. The "market" was actually more of a mall. Several stories with loads of stores that seemed identical, we had the opportunity to spend our money on not only pearls, but jade, turquoise, clothing, music and dvds.

We bought a jade pendant for Kate, looked briefly at the pearls, then headed to the dvd store. They had dvds that work in all regions that have Chinese language options (which we learned last night while out shopping thanks to a cool hip Chinese mandarin speaking teenager that was able to get our little stinker to speak mandarin, that Kate does indeed understand Mandarin) which will be great for Kate to retain her maternal language. The store clerks opened up the drawer of Disney dvds and Kate went to town. She picked out Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, a Mickey Mouse movie, Underdog, Alvin and the Chipmunks and a Barbie Movie. Alex got AVP, National Treasures 2 and the Superhero Movie. We were quite thrilled at the 16 yuan (2 bucks) per dvd until we learned at the hotel that we could get them a block away from the hotel for 5 yuan each.

This afternoon after Phil got back from working on paper work for the American consulate visit this week, we suited up and headed to the pool. It was cold, but those resilient kids splashed and floated until their lips turned blue. And then swam some more.

The icing on the cake de jour was pizza and a movie in our room thanks to Papa John's delivery! Life doesn't get any better (or maybe we've just hit our saturation level for Asian food).