Surprise!

Last night a very tired girl fell asleep before her head hit the pillow. Heads spinning a busy, emotional day. My Mom, Erich and I were preparing ourselves for an early morning tour of her “finding spot”, which we had experienced before and were humbled and saddened by. The last time we visited her orphanage we all were rather shaken by the walk to her abandonment site. It was a lonely park entrance, gated and off a not-so-busy pedestrian street.

But I get ahead of myself… first I have to tell you about the strange hotel (Michelangelo murals), a cloying perfumy smell, a version on Chinese Christmas music blasting out of speakers and a large gingerbread house built out of crackers, a lot of ducks quacking in the background and open air rooms.

Breakfast was an odd conglomeration of disco Christmas and very humorously worded American breakfast translations like “Old Mother Dope”, “Bacon Spell Double Bowel” and “Acid Beans”, which lightened the mood. Let me go on the record as saying that learning a second language, let alone translating it, is better left to folks more talented than I… seeing that we came to China knowing how to say “hello”, “thank you” and “cold beer”, we are not ones to judge!  But we enjoyed the laugh none-the-less!

Grace, our curious and prepared guide, came at 09:00 AM with new news. The place that they showed us as the abandonment site better than 10 years ago was wrong. Grace had studied Coco’s record in Guangzhou, discussed Coco’s finding with the orphanage director, and discovered that the report said Coco was found “at the bridge by the entrance”, not the entrance initially shown to us. Away we went, and here is what we experienced. The second park entrance on the north side of the park was a bridge that saw its way to a beautiful entrance, trees strung with red lanterns, fruit and food stands, a busy downtown full of bustling storefronts, a park taken over by the study of Tai Chi, and an impromptu place for facial waxing under old growth trees that was alive with neighborly activity.

She was loved, worried about, left in a place where she would be found and taken somewhere where she would be looked after.

Coco is standing where she was found!

As her Mom and Dad and Grandmother, what a difference a new location makes.

We shopped for knives (ceramic, dual purpose) in Yangjiang and headed back to Guangzhou. On the way back to Guangzhou, we stopped at a rest area and lunch in Foshan. The restaurant was a Chinese version of multi-purpose development with housing upstairs and a pond of huge koi in the back yard. On the way to the bathrooms, patrons were provided views of caged snakes, pigeons, turtles and other sorts of creatures. We visited the Qingping Market and neighboring pet market in Guangzhou with piles of kittens and puppies, birds and such, and oohed and awed. And went on to the Chinese medicine market to observe the vast array of Chinese medicinals then out of the City at sunset where you could truly appreciate its vastness and monumental populace.

We then boarded a train (a Bullet train) to Guilin for the evening to begin our tour of this geologic tourist area.