After breakfast, we skyped home. It was so funny that the day I put the turtle shirt on Cheng Cheng, Thomas had his on too, back home. Both of them thought that was great!
After skyping, we met our faithful guide and driver for our scheduled activity, a museum visit. You would think we would be too tired to go anywhere after the day we had yesterday, but we wanted to get out of our hotel room, which reeked of dirty diapers even though I brought small scented trash bags to encapsulate the diapers.
This picture is for my boys back home--a Chinese fire truck.
Our destination, the Henan Provincial Museum.
They have very secure museums here in China--we have to show our passports to get tickets, and you go through screening and a metal detector. This is the entrance hall. I think this is from a local folk tale, but anyway, it was big so we took a picture.
There were several floors of artifacts, but there isn't time to post all of the 200 photos we took of them.
The things I was most excited to see were the oracle bones. These are so old, and oracle bone writing was how Chinese characters developed.
These were used to predict the future. Inscriptions were made on bone or turtle shells, such as, "The harvests will be good this year," and then the bone was cracked with a hot iron to see if it would happen or not.
Froggy and Little Panda particularly liked this impressive bronze water cauldron.
I was excited to see this jade burial suit, but then I saw that it is a replica so I felt cheated.
They had a very good collection of ancient pillows--talk about comfort, these were made of porcelain.
My favorite pillow was this one that was made to look like a tiger. It is about 800 years old.
Froggy and Little Panda like big things like this sculpture.
This is only a hundred years old or so, but I thought it was a very realistic-looking vegetable.
The kids were not very impressed with the artifacts, although they very patiently rode quietly in the stroller. They were happy when we left--Cheng Cheng brightened up and gave me a hug!
We went to a mall to try to find Cheng Cheng another pair of shoes. We drove down two levels into a very confusing parking garage. We did find an elevator, but we had to go up a flight of stairs to get to it. So much for being accessible for strollers.
We found a shoe area with a camel brand--Hannah had to have a picture with the camel.
Cheng Cheng was not very excited about the shoes.
We tried offering him a different color, but he wouldn't say anything.
I bought them anyway, since he will be too cold on the airplane in sandals, and the shoes were on sale and very cute. Therese at least was enthusiastic about the shoes, and wanted to hold the bag.
We went to a Carrefour in the mall so we could buy a suitcase to replace the one that got broken on the flight over. The driver is a typical man who doesn't enjoy shopping but he came along and insisted on pushing the stroller through the store, just like he did through the museum.
Back at our hotel room, I tried to use the awful internet, but I at least looked good even though I didn't get much blogging done, thanks to Cheng Cheng putting a bunch of Therese's play jewelry on me.
They had so much fun with the toy cell phones and jewelry. There was so much chattering in Chinese, and lots of giggling. We needed some down time in the room after our long day yesterday.
