China Day 10 - Wuhan Museum
 

 Today we visited the local museum which houses the relics of a tomb that is over 2,400 years old.  The tomb belongs to Zeng Hou Yi who was a noble that lived to about age 42 which was a very advanced age in their time.  This man was buried with his wives, concubines, pets and treasure including bronze dishes which could only be used by emperors, which he was planning to be in his next life.  This nobleman was also a musician and was buried with a set large bronze bells, each of which can be struck at different places to create two different tones!  After seeing the 2400 year old set, we were given a performance on a replica, accompanied by many different Chinese percussion instruments.

Here's Tim and Sophie on the bus on the way to the Museum.  Sophie LOVED running around the museum because it was a big open space between the exhibits.  She is getting faster and faster every day!

In the afternoon, Sue, Sophie and Tim took a walk around the local neighborhood.  The streets are STINKY but well kept.  Many people cook outside on the sidewalk, and of course the laundry is hung out to dry all over the place.  Since Wuhan is in the south part of China it gets to be around 104 degrees in the summertime.  I can't imagine what that would smell like!  The Hubei province also gets a lot of rain and has over 600 lakes, so a lot of construction is underway to deliver some of this rain to dryer areas such as Beijing.

We ended up at a local shopping area and there was a little kid play place so we stopped in and let Sophie try out some toys.

There are a lot of boutique shops like this (especially clothing) for kids because they are only allowed one child, two if the first one is a girl.  Boys are wanted more to carry on the family name and to provide for the family in their retirement.  Chinese almost never adopt a child because they don't understand why they would raise someone that's not their own blood.  The few that do adopt never tell anyone, and if its found out its kind of a shameful thing!  So they look at Americans adopting their babies as a very altruistic thing and we get a lot of "thumbs up" from people, and they have an expression, that the "baby has jumped into the honey jar", as they are lucky to come with us to America to live in a loving family.

Guess what - our hotel has a Chinese restaurant!  There's a very nice restaurant on the 2nd floor of this hotel that is all private dining rooms.  We rented one of these rooms with 2 other couples (and their babies) and had a wonderful delicious meal. 

The wait staff loved Sophie, they chased her around and fawned over her, gave her packages of sugar to rattle, and overall they have gone out of their way to be nice to her and us!  Yes at least 4 staff members were there serving the 9 of us.  Excellent service as we've found everywhere!

Here's the Sophinator as we get ready to go to dinner...