China Day 9 - Wuhan Tour
 

 Today was a sightseeing tour of Wuhan which is made up of three smaller cities, that have converged on the Han river, the longest tributary of the Yangtze River, and the biggest stop on the "3 gorges" tour, a popular tourist activity.  This city is over 1700 years old!  When you think that the U.S. is only 225+ years old, this is quite a long history!  People that come from Hubei province are called "9 headed birds" by other Chinese because they have a reputation of being very smart!

It was a beautiful day, about 65 degrees, so we visited a park along the Han river which is so big it takes 4 hours to walk end to end!  Although it was warm, we were warned to dress Sophie warmly.  The Chinese are very particular about how kids are dressed and we were told by the locals that we did a good job to dress her warmly.  Other parents had a small bit of ankle showing and so old women would run up and tug up their socks or tug down their pants to cover any exposed skin!  It was very cute how caring they were.

Sophie's fan club happened to be at the park that day.  Everyone wanted to hold her, talk to her, talk to us and we showed a card written in Mandarin that explained that we had just adopted her, and everyone gave us a "thumbs up" and said lucky baby!  Here are a few pictures of us at the park with all of the people gathering around.  No, we do not know any of them!

If her hands touched anything that they thought was dirty, they would grab them and wipe them off with their own hands immediately!

After feeling a bit like the Beatles on their Sgt. Pepper tour, we walked off quickly and were by ourselves for a few minutes:

Then we saw another Chinese family with their daughter.  We thought Sophie was going over to say Hi but she had an ulterior motive - she saw their grocery bag!  She reached in and helped herself to a box of rice milk!  We had know idea what it was but she obviously knew.  We were embarrassed but they graciously gave it to her. Here we are pictured below, pilfering their groceries and I'm an accessory to the crime, helping her get rid of the stolen goods:

We also saw the local police out in a show of force - not a smart place to be stealing groceries.

Then we went out to a restaurant that had excellent food.  It is one that is privately owned, by a woman no less!  She has 4 restaurants and our guide explained that she has excellent quality and low prices - an emerging market economy at work!  The food was delicious - sweet and sour fish, sausage dumplings, noodle dishes, chrysanthemum tea which we were told reduces "inner heat", lotus roots, and much more which I can't remember but ate all of!  Sophie ate everything, and lots of it!  The restaurant is huge (don't be fooled by the mirror at the end, though).  There were hundreds of people there.
 

Here's a quick shot of some of the typical scenery we went by in this city of 8 million people:

And finally a shot of Daddy and baby bonding :)