Day 11 - Nanchang Zoo

Today we went to the Nanchang Zoo. It was kind of a depressing zoo because they have everything in cages with no sort of habitat at all. There were all sorts of things we had never seen before, such as yaks, vultures, giant snakes, and leopards and jaguars living with wild dogs. But by far the star attractions were a real live Panda and the opportunity to feed the elephants.

The Panda is on loan from another zoo - they call it LazyBones because usually all it does is sleep. However, we were lucky enough to see it awake and eating eucalypus leaves. Obviously, since Pandas are Chinese treasures, by far the biggest group of people were around it's cage. This was really neat.

We all got to feed the elephants. Seriously. Hand feeding elephants. For one Yuan you get a stack of sugarcane. The elephants are in a lowered pit but their heads are almost at ground level, so they can reach their trunks up onto the ledge and take the sugarcane right out of your hand. Again, very cool. We have never been so close to an elephant - you could actually touch their trunks if you want, which we did. The hands you see in the pictures are ours, feeding an elephant and rubbing its trunk. And, yes, we used several disinfectant wipes afterwards.

Again we attracted crowds of interested, friendly people. Ivie and the other little girls were the stars of the show, of course, but there was also interest in the American tourists. Although it gets quite claustrophobic in a tightly wound group of lots of people, all the Chinese people have been most gracious and pleasant, even venturing to practice a little English with us.

After the zoo we went to lunch and Ivie helped herself to two lotus rolls and two pieces of watermelon. She was a mess afterwards, but very, very cute, as always.

Right now we're spending the last afternoon in Nanchang hanging around our hotel room listening to Ivie cry as she tries to fall asleep for her nap. She's had a long week, just like us. We can't explain how spiritual and moving this journey has been. She's just perfect, our little angel. We think she's getting used to us more and more each day. We hope we're collecting enough memories to share with her when she's older. While we're ready to come home, we'll miss Nanchang and we'll look forward to the next visit. We continue to pray for Ivie's birth parents, nanny, and foster family. We hope our prayers will reach them so they can rest assured that Ivie has found a loving family to take care of her and love her for ever.

Tomorrow we leave for Guangzhou at 1:40 p.m. (Monday afternoon). The flight is about 2 hours. We'll spend Monday night and Tuesday hanging out, our Consulate appointment is Wednesday (recall, for Ivie's immigrant Visa), we'll hang out Thursday (including the famous "red couch" picture), and we'll fly home Friday at 11:00 a.m. We are so excited to see everyone and to introduce everyone to our precious baby girl.

Love,

Scott and Renee