Boxing Day

I trust everyone had a good Christmas or maybe it still is for you in Ontario. I think you are a day behind China. We spent the afternoon shopping trying to find Maelyn a present but there isn't anything for children here. Even when we are taking subways and trains we hardly ever see children. Everyone is in their late 20's and thirties. So hopefully when we go to Beijing we can find her something. I think I am getting a cold. The days are so hot but than it cools off in the evenings so much that you have to wear a coat. We had a nice xmas supper here at the base last night. Our team went back to our bedroom and opened up the presents we had bought each other here. Maelyn got a set of chopsticks. We are teasing her telling her she is turning into a Chinese girl because she eats with chopsticks all the time. She went for Dim Sum for breakfast the other day and loved it. It's been fun eating out. We are so thankful that Lisa on our team speaks mandarin and cantonese. Thank you for the comments everyone! David, I remember you had said that you and Diana had your honeymoon here. Hong Kong really is a nice city. Very clean. Really pretty with the mountains in the background and I love the palm trees. No foreigners when we are out and about but we don't get any second looks maybe that will come as we travel more into China. The chinese people keep to themselves. They seem busy. No smiles or conversations. Tomorrow is our day off. Thursday we leave for Guangdong. We are going out to a cultural thingy where we try different foods, etc. than from there we go to a hotel and teach in a local school for five days next week. After that we come back to Hong Kong and help out in orphanges. So we will be in Guangdong for New Years eve and New Years Day. We have to take a 20 hour train ride to get to central China. Hopefully this train ride we will see countryside. When we took the train ride to get Maelyn it was night time and we didn't see anything. Today we are going to watch the outreach team do their drama. It will be nice to stay in a hotel for a week. It's tough sharing the bathroom with so many people and the shower is right next to the toilet and the water goes on the floor and the toilet paper goes in a basket. We thought we would have a treat going out yesterday to the mall and restaurant as far as bathrooms go but they were all squattie potties. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a hole in the floor. It requires good leg muscles and balancing skill so you don't step into the hole like I almost did after trying to pull my pants up that were around my ankles trying not to get wet! I can hear Michael saying that is more information than he needed to know. Ha!Ha! It's been nice having internet access at the base here. Once we are in China everything will be screened more closely. One of the chinese staff here bought Maelyn two books that have the chinese characters so she's having fun learning that. She is doing really good on the trip being with adults all the time. It's fun to watch her with the Koreans on our team when we ride the subway they play rock paper sissors with her Korean style. It has more hand gestures and they laugh their heads off playing it. We noticed some of the Chinese were even smiling watching them have fun. Anyway, I should go. I have to figure out which boxes to click, everything is in chinese characters.