We finalized the local paperwork and saw her hometown!

We just finalized paperwork with the orphanage director! Now we wait for our visa so we can leave the province and finalize the national level paperwork. Abby is adopted.

It was great to get out of the city and go to Yingtan. On the way, we saw farmers gathering the first rice crops (they grow 3 in one year). Under the guardrail is a farmer with his water buffalo!

This is on the drive to Yingtan. It is mountainous and they mine bronze, copper, and tungsten and they quarry this red rock.

This is the area our daughter was found in. Probably over by the red sign above Joe's head. It is a hotel. We didn't get to meet the man that found her but maybe when we come back sometime.

This was the table at the restaurant in Yingtan. There's a couple from the same orphanage to Julie's left who got a boy. The blond girl with the baby in the sling and her husband brought there parents and that's her mom next to her. We didn't know if we would get to go here. We had to make sure the babies were adjusting well. So our guide only had a few hours to plan our trip and didn't book a place to eat. Our driver found this place. Our guide apoligized for not being able to have a private room but this was the first time we ate outside the hotel & it was great food. It was very noising. There was a wedding banquet with alot of drinking games that almost inturrupted into a brawl. There was also a celebration in honor of a one month old. (Instead of baby showers, when the baby is one month, the whole family has a feast and the father gives out red eggs.

This is my (Julie) lunch plate. They have great greens here but they don't give specific names to their vegetables. So if I find one I like it's hard to order it again because when I ask what kind of vegetable it is, they look at me funny (it's a green one dummy!). The food at the bottom of the plate is a Yingtan local dish - some kind of beef with the fat and skin on. The beef was good, I left the other part because - you know - in Asia it's polite to leave some food on your plate and I always try to be polite. :) The other thing was a spicy flattened beef, I didn't show you the whole spread including the fried fish with head & tail & skin. Our guide insisted we all try some because it was fresh from the river in town so I had a small bite & it was good - somekind of whitefish with really strange bones (no Samuel I didn't eat the fish eye).

This is a cemetery between Yingtan & Nanchang. The one closer to Nanchang looked like a room dug out of a hill with a traditional Chinese door built into the mound so they can go in and worship their ancestors. The ones closer to Yingtan were built of rock and looked like tiny pyramids. Both of those were smaller than this, maybe they were for individual families.

This is a real pearl farm. These are bottles floating at the top tied to mark the spot below where the pearl is growing.

Abby really likes to ride in the stroller at the hotel. We go up & down our hallway listening to the same "American" soundtrack. It has about 13 instrumental songs I guess they think all Americans will know & like. There's the cajun song, the Irish song, something by Wham, etc. We have a great view of the Gan river from our floor.