So, this is Foshan, the Guangdong Province city famed for porcelain, martial arts (my tai chi chuan teacher came from Foshan), and adoptive parents displaced by the 99th annual Canton Trade Show, which has utterly consumed the city.

We visited the pearl market (a pearl market) today. From our facilitator's description -- and from the look of the place -- it's basically a wholesale outlet mall. We scored some jewelry and pirated DVDs (just kidding, customs officials!), but couldn't find a place that sold shoelaces. Unless I wanted the shoes to go with them.

The son (son!) seemed not to mind so much.

See mommy! See mommy break daddy!

Laugh, daddy. Laugh!

There are a lot of scooters here. We have to drive about an hour and a half every day on the bus to Shamian Island, where the paperwork happens and where the notorious famous White Swan Hotel perches like a bird of ill omen glorious reminder of better days. It's not so bad. I look out the window at the trees, and they're familiar trees. Mangos. Banyans. Norfolk pines. Trees that I see every day at home in Florida. Trees that thrive in the cloying heat and humidity that's making some of our more northerly travel companions wilt. And, for that matter, making us wilt as well.

Our son (son!) is arousing more surprised looks from the shop girls of Shamian Island, because he's got pretty eyes. And, you know, an adopted son is rarer than hair on a bird, as those familiar with the system (as are the shop girls of Shamian Island) know full well.

As I type this in our room at the deluxe, executive, free mostly functional internet in the room Foshan Hotel, the young man is converting the international business ambience to something out of Jurassic Park. He's very enthusiastic about the Heinz baby food. It's very noisy and full of delight. And, well, has required a full-sized towel as protection against flying food particles. We think he's more or less over his cold and the bowels are no longer exactly brick factories (although still not as pleasant as should be).

My Bibulous Spouse tonight will be having her first beer in China this trip. I'm eating meat for the duration of this trip, so it's only right that she should have the beer. Chinese beer is good -- it has German roots, from when Germany had a canton (oh! yeah! that word!) further up the coast from here, which is why Tsing Tao beer tastes a bit like Beck's.

BBC News tells us there's a tropical cyclone in Australia, and trouble in the Solomon Islands, but Nepal seems to have calmed down, which is nice.

So, yesterday, we trucked out straight from the airport to Shamian Island and had the militaristic medical exam, in which no doctors asked my son (son!) to turn his head and cough, thank goodness, but during which I wouldn't have been surprised if they had. He weighs 19 pounds, is 29 inches from head to toe, and is, for official purposes, perfectly healthy. We also had the American visa photos taken for our little foreign nationals. Today, the paperwork was processed (no stray letters in our married names this time around, no odd wrinkles in our homestudy xeroxes -- and yes, they're *that* persnickety at the U.S. consulate). Tomorrow, we get to ride out again, hold up our right hands and swear and affirm on our infants' behalfs (behalves?) that they'll be upstanding citizens once they set their tiny feet (or, more likely, are carried bodily through the baggage check area) on American soil and the customs officials take our brown envelope and declare the kid U. S. of Avian.

Does he look ready? He looks ready to me.

One of the other things that has happened now is that we've been united with other families from our agency that traveled to another province. We're two busses worth. There's one family that adopted a waiting child -- a gorgeous young girl who has a heart murmur. Easily corrected with surgery back in the states, but needed reassurance from a doctor in our party that flying would be OK. In my few brief glimpses of her, she looks a bit stunned by her change in scenery but delighted by the physical affection and food she's getting. And is, as previously mentioned, stunningly beautiful.

Almost as gwai as our son (son!).