Joys first airplane ride:Beijing-Guangzhou

This morning we packed up all our belongings to be prepared for our flight. We ventured out on the subway to “Silk Street”. This is actually a multi-level shopping mall of hundreds of vendors who sell knock-offs of designer brand clothing and other articles. Ebay-minded Amy loves the negotiating and psychological game this shopping entails. The shop owners charmingly says, “I like you very much, I will give you an extra special price”. Then they quote a price which is usually about twice what they’re willing to settle for. Amy says she’ll pay a third of that price. The shop owner then winces, almost cries, and says “you’re killing me, this is extra fine quality”. Amy then smiles and says thank you so much and walks away. They run after you and say, “Okay, I’ll take your price…” or something a little higher. It’s so much fun

Having Joy with us makes this negotiating even more interesting. Sometimes we even get nervous and wince. During negotiating she haggles them so low, I don’t know if she says they need to do something nice for these Americans, or what, but she can get the price even lower.

We ran back to the hotel after this shopping adventure just in time for our shuttle to the airplane. Joy had been nervous all day: she gets motion sickness, and she’d never been on an airplane before. Knowing this, Max had purchase “Bromine” (is that the name, some product that is supposed to be even better than Dramamine) to help her make it through this trip. She flatly refused. We asked our friend, Linda Lau, to help us explain to her about the medicine. After Linda wasn’t able to make any headway, she sensed that Joy had had some bad experience with medicine that made her not trust taking any.

In the end, the trip was fine. She did sleep through it all; but she didn’t get sick.

We finally got to our hotel in Guangzhou by around 10pm. Our friend, Yongguang’s sister and niece were there waiting for us, and we had a nice visit with them.