Today is our last full day in Harbin. No events are planned and we will be on our own most of the day as another family from Texas arrived last night and Lynn will be taking them to meet their son today. He is from a different orphanage in Heilongjiang Province though, several hours away.
We went out for a walk down the pedestrian street this morning and Bei Bei was pretty good again about staying close to us, though a bit more adventurous this time. While it is a pedestrian street, there are still several cross streets. For any of you that have been in China you are familiar with the rules at intersections, even signalized intersections. There are none. Thus the extra importance of keeping Bei Bei close. We are learning children like to hear explanations, though they may not always appreciate them. Our issuance of single word commands in Mandarin, perhaps unintelligible to begin with, do not seem to influence her much. Lynn’s assistance is always invaluable in explaining our attempts. When we are on our own it is always interesting. Always a bit awkward to have a Chinese daughter in China having a pout in the middle of a street amongst thousands of her fellow countrymen with Caucasian parents talking to her in English. All in all a good outing though. She is so much fun to watch. Not sure she ever “walks.” Always a skip or a prance. Our daughter is a very good natured girl (most of the time….).
Later this afternoon Susan Meng, the director of the provincial adoption authority who we met during our two visits to that office, came by with Lynn to the hotel to drop off a lovely photo album of pictures taken during our adoption process there. We gave her the clothes we had purchased for the orphanage. She was very appreciative. We were hoping Lynn could stay with us and perhaps we would go up to the river front but they are a very busy group right now so she was unable to. Lynn is so sweet and says she loves her work which is also very obvious. She says her father is also very proud of her which we can easily understand. That on at least one occasion he trailed her to watch her in action with a couple of families that had traveled together. Another proud Ba Ba.
The other family that had come in from Texas opted to move to our hotel for the convenience of having adjoining rooms. They have 4 children, actually as of this evening five. They traveled with their oldest and their youngest, who is also adopted from China. Their other two children stayed in Texas with their grandparents. We met them for dinner in our hotel and we all had pizza together. They are a wonderful family and their new son is adorable, as are there other children. They were still exhausted from their travel as they had just arrived the night before from the U.S. 
When we went back up to our room, David and Steve broke out a small bottle of Russian vodka that had been previously purchased. There is an Ice Bar on the pedestrian street which is completely constructed of ice (maybe not the roof…). It had ice walls, and ice bar, ice benches, ice tables, ice counters and ice shot glasses, two of which we just so happened to have. So we conclude our evening toasting our time in Harbin the Harbin way, with Russian vodka in ice shot glasses. I am sure there are those amongst you who will say we received what we deserved if we come down with a stomach bug by drinking from the ice. Hopefully the Vodka killed what ever little bugs we have been avoiding by drinking bottled water. So we practice our Russian. Za druzhbu myezhdu narodami! (zah droozh-boo myezh-doo nuh-roh-duh-mee; To friendship between nations!)
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