Day 8: Taxi’s, aquarium and grieving

Today we headed out to the Zhengzhou Aquarium. Maria had a fit when we tried to put gloves on her, then later on decided her hands were cold and wanted gloves. Next thing we learned is that Maria HATES taxi’s. When we get in a cab she comes un-glued, screaming, kicking you name it. She yells Bu Yah. We are not sure why she does not like them, we do know that she calms down if Rita our guide holds her but she has to learn to be with us as Rita will be history tomorrow.

The aquarium was fun, they have some very nice exhibits and even a walk through tunnel under the sea where you see stingray’s, sharks and other marine life. Maria really liked it and calmed down and had fun there. We fed sea turtles and got to see two shows. The first show was a guy swimming and dancing with various creatures from stingray to sharks. The next show was a mermaid swimming and a prince joined her. We could not understand any of the narration but the Chinese people seemed to like it. The girls really enjoyed it.

We went out to hail a cab and the first 2 cabs stopped and said we had too big of crowd plus stroller and need to wait for larger cab. Finally a guy stopped and took us in his tinny cab.

We stopped at McDonalds for a quick lunch. No we are not eating American fast food all the time but for lunch it is often the best way to go. McDonalds could not sell us Big Mac’s today so we had to settle for double cheese burgers. Hard to imagine McDonalds without Big Mac’s. Maria loved Chicken nuggets and fries.

Once back at the hotel Maria had another melt down and cried for about 45 minutes and finally went to sleep. She is starting to figure out that everything is changed and to a degree is not too happy that we are her parents yet. This is all part of the grieving process and will get better over time. When she is mad at us she will refuse to look at us and trys to just ignore us.

While all the girls napped, daddy went out exploring in the local market. It was fun trying to bargain with vendors who spoke no English. It was fun to get out and see some real China like this. I managed to purchase a very nice neck tie at one of the local shops for a very good price.

After nap time Maria was fine and we went to the play room and the girls had fun playing. We then walked to a local Chinese restaurant for dinner. We had been told that some waiters spoke English but they spoke very little. So Forrest started ordering courses and with the exception of the first course the food was great. The first course was a noodle dish, turns out it was a cold dish and was SO SPICY that it sat our mouths on fire.

That is our day in a nutshell. Tomorrow we pick up Maria’s passport and then hang out at the hotel until about 3:30 then we are off to the airport. We fly to Guangzhou tomorrow evening. We are all ready for warmer weather, Guangzhou is about as far south as Cuba so should be nicer weather than we have seen up here. Hard to do anything outside when it is below 20 degrees during the day time and walking back from dinner at night is very brisk.

Continue to pray that Maria bonds with us and learns that we are her parents and that she has to obey our rules. She is catching on to communication and repeats most words that we say to her. Sometimes when when she can not understand us she will look at us and go (ya oh ya oh ya oh ya) which is just babble. That must be what our words sound like to her.

We know things will get better each day and this is all normal but it is no less difficult when you see your child hurting so bad and they will not allow you to help them.