continued from part 1

I was happy to see the nurses at the medical appointment test Caleb for colorblindness...he doesn't seem to care what color his shirt and pants are when getting dressed in the morning, but I'm happy to know that he just doesn't have a taste for fashion rather than being truly colorblind!

After the medical exam, we headed back to the hotel and the other children were just rousing from their beds for the day. I was glad to see that they could sleep in because Alyssa has been quite sick the past few days. She hasn't wanted to eat much other than fried rice or noodles since we arrived in China and I've worried that she would become ill keeping up with our hectic travel pace, but not eating. Well, my predictions came true and she is not feeling well at all.

We dumped our laundry today at one of the tourist stores here on the island. Most of them advertise laundry service as they know that parents arriving here have already spent one week in their child's province to process their adoption and probably have at least a full week's worth of dirty clothes. I fear I will have to sell one of our children to pay for the two very full duffle bags we gave them but we were promised a 40% discount at a small hole-in-the-wall store called Susan's Place and their prices were already way less than half of what the hotel laundry charges, so hopefully we won't gasp at the final price. At this point, whatever it costs will be well worth having clean smelling clothes once again.

At least one of us needs to hang tight at the hotel until we get the "all clear" from Raymond that our paperwork was OK at the consulate. He called us to let us know that he had picked up all the medical paperwork, which was very considerate of him. Now we are just waiting for him to drop that back off at the consulate and let us know that we are done until tomorrow when we have our swearing in ceremony.

Jeff volunteered to stay at the hotel while I head over to the Bank of China in the White Swan hotel to see if they will change our traveler's checks. The airport won't, and none of the banks we went to in Wuhan would either. The irony is that one of the banks we went to actually sells American Express traveler's checks themselves, but would not cash them for us! Actually, that's not totally true... after much polite arguing and having to go upstair to two different bank manager's offices they said they would do it but they wanted to pay me .75 less than the going rate and then
charge me a fee on top of it so I told them no and left. I wish someone had told me that this would be so difficult because when we were here before, we got a higher rate for traveler's checks than cash and that is the only reason we bought them.

OK, I am getting cabin fever so we are going to go outside and appreciate the gorgeous weather here for two days while we can. Tomorrow night we will be heading out to Beijing where it will be just a tad bit chillier than here...about 60 or 70 degrees chillier!