Tuesday, November 11

Another busy day in Guangzhou!
We walked to a beautiful, humongous park, Yuexiu Park. The "famous" statue of the five goats is there, along with gobs of people having their picture taken in front of it. Guangzhou is known as Goat City because these five celestial goats helped found the city. Kind of like a Chinese Romulus and Remus. The other funny thing we saw was all these retired people playing hackey sack in the park. It's like the new national sport. In another part of the park, couples were ballroom dancing to music over a loudspeaker. Shane and I walked, Lia slept in her stroller, as we explored much more of this beautiful oasis in the middle of this noisy, busy, bustling city.

At 2 we boarded a bus to go to a Buddhist temple - the Liu Rong Temple that has a pagoda that's 1000 years old. The neatest thing there, though, was that most of us had our girls blessed by a Buddhist monk. We stepped into the temple, took our shoes off, and knelt before the Buddha of the Present. There were two equally large, gold 15-foot tall Buddhas on either side--one of the past, one of the future. The monk burned incense, chanted, beat a stick against a wooden block, occasionally rang a bell, then stepped among us and flicked droplets of water on us. We all felt blessed--it really was moving.

We then boarded a bus for the Liwan plaza--pearl market. The "mall" itself was very bizarre-the first mall 6 stories of mostly clothing stores, the second mall 6 stories filled with all sorts of jewelry. Imagine ABC Trading on Olive and multiply it by 100. Turquoise, cubic zirconia, pearls--and mostly looking all really fake. Our guide was supposedly able to get us good deals on jade and pearls--I passed on both. We went outside to the teeming masses in a pedestrian mall. We walked into several sporting goods stores in search of large/tall sizes for Peter. Shane tried on a 4XL and it was too small for him--we are from the land of the giants. In these stores--brightly lit, small, crowded and pulsating with loud music--all the sales girls and boys played with Lia and our friend Katie, and wanted to hold them. And, strangest of all, many of them wanted to know if they were Chinese babies. Even tonight at dinner the waitresses wanted to know if they were Chinese babies. What else could they be? Shane said I should say it's Yao Ming's baby.

We made it back to the hotel, went out to dinner with the Irishes at Macau Street, bumped into the Watts with their beautiful Sophie on the street, have had bottle, bath, and ready for bed. Tomorrow: Pearl River cruise.