Our last night in China!

This is our last night in China! Wooohooo!
Right now, we're packing for our grueling 30+ hours in airplanes and airports and trying to get Olivia a bath and to sleep a little early.

The first picture you see is our favorite shop here on Shamian Island, Guangzhou. The store is called "Andy's Place", and it's one of a number of similar stores. If you look down the main street in front of our hotel, you can see several stores with names like "Jessica's", "Sally's", "Jennifer's", and such. We were helped by a girl named Mary every time at Andy's. Mary promised to give us "the good discount", and we enjoyed talking to her.

The second picture is of us with the painting of Olivia and the artist. His name is Ben, and you may not be able to see it in the picture or not, but he has long wavy hair, which is somewhat of an anomaly here in China among men. He's a really nice guy that Pat has known for several years, and he's done some beautiful paintings for Pat and many other families. We never got to see Ben until tonight, our last night, and the other people in the art shop kept assuring us that "the Ben was here earlier, but he'll be back". When we went to pick up the painting, they said "the Ben is in the White Swan", and we figured we'd been fooled, and that he was not really here. Christine and I saw who we thought to be Ben approaching, but Pat didn't see him at first. When Ben and Pat first saw each other, it was such a joyous reunion. Ben's English is fairly good for a Chinese person, and he almost teared up trying to explain how happy he was to see Pat. He gave her a big hug, and just couldn't stop smiling and talking to her. He agreed to make a picture with us, and he did something else which is an anomaly among Chinese people - he put his arm around us.

The third picture is of Christine, Olivia and me in front of a waterfall in the hotel lobby. In the pond are hundreds of colorful and large koi.

This afternoon we went to the U.S. Consulate for a swearing in ceremony. There were probably about 75 families there altogether, and we had to go up to a window one by one where someone looked at us and our passports to verify our identity. Then, an American official gathered us all together, and had us raise our right hand while repeating a pledge about the information we've provided.

As I understand it, Olivia will be a U.S. citizen when she gets her passport stamped by the United States government officials in Detroit!

We're trying to get packed for a very early morning checkout and travel to the airport. We're hoping that we can get Olivia to wake up for the flight to Tokyo, then go to sleep for most of the long flight from Tokyo to Detroit.

This will probably be our last entry on The Adoption Journey of Olivia Grace Jones. Our flight number coming from Memphis to Mobile is Northwest flight 5795, leaving Memphis at 7:40 p.m., arriving in Mobile at 8:55 p.m. on Wednesday. We hope to see you there!

Michael, Christine and Olivia Mei Grace Jones