Friday

Hello All! We are so sorry about the sporadic blog posts. We've actually written something everyday but it's been really difficult to get them to actually post on the blog so we've decided to send them as email and have Amanda post them for us. Today (Saturday) was the first day we didn't have anything scheduled. We are killing time waiting to get Jade's passport from the provincial government. We took a taxi (my first taxi ride ever) about twelve blocks or so away looking for a shop that would make a Chinese name stamp jor us. We thought we'd found a shop that could do it but after waiting for 45 minutes we came back to pick it up and she gave us our money back. She tried to explain why she could't do it but we don't understand Chinese. That tends to be a problem in China. We did get an interesting 45 minute walk out of it. The thing I'm learning about China is that on main roads that tourists and wealthy people hangout in it's super clean - like not even a cigarette in the gutter. Shop owners are constantly cleaning their area of side walk. If you get very far off the beaten path you get into how the normal Chinese live. It's crowded, sometimes clean, sometimes dirty and chaotic. We'll add some pictures to show you all some of the things we saw. We didn't do much this afternoon. Matt's stomach isn't feeling too hot today so we're sticking close to the hotel. He started on an antibiotic so I'm hoping that helps or the rest of this trip could be really long. We saw the sun today which was a first since being in Zhenzhou. The haze ( is it pollution ?) Is so thick the sun doesn't break through. It can be hard to tell which direction your headed or if it might actually be rain clouds. I miss blue skies and sunshine. We did see a Home Depot. I wasn't expecting that. We leave tomorrow afternoon to go into southern China to finish up our appointments with the American consulate. It's been a slow day for news.Besides a stomach ache, we are the lucky ones.Matt and Melissa