Well, after many days on an airplane (okay maybe only one day, but it sure felt like more), we've arrived in Guangzhou. A hot shower and firm, flat bed never felt so good! We were so exhausted and got very little sleep on the plane. Good news, though, it was 1am and we crashed. We awoke at 9a and were pretty well rested and on China time (at least for today...or at least for this morning).
We had our first breakfast this morning, and were thrilled to see dragon fruit being served at the buffet. It brings back great memories of gorging ourselves on dragon fruit at the White Swan, while we were adopting Nina and Phoebe (during separate visits back in 2005 and 2007). The bacon is so tasty as well, with more meat than fat (unlike what we normally get at home). Ah, what a nice start to the day.
Okay, back to the room to try and figure out the internet connections and the like. Fire up my work VPN, input login in and password, and it starts to connect...Uh Oh, "server not available" message pops-up. China has our VPN blocked!!! This could be bad - I can't search with Google, we can't post on our blog, I can't even check my fantasy baseball standings, what's a guy to do...all right, think calmly...We had heard of a couple of VPN's that work in China - PandaPow and Express. We never thought we would be able to download what was needed to fire them up, but I e-mail my sons (Nick and Louis) to try and figure something out from the US and send us an e-mail to help solve. Just for the fun of it, I go to the PandaPow sight to find out more, and click the download button expecting to see the block window pop-up...it doesn't. Okay, now they want money...$9 for one month, fully refundable if not happy. Okay, I pay through Paypal and voila, it works - what a shock! All is well!!
After our breakfast, we went for a stroll around the Garden Hotel, and were pleasantly surprised to see the standard of living has seemingly increased many-fold since our last visits. A stroll through the local mall (The Friendship Store) was on the verge of shocking. We pass by a jewelry booth with jade items for sale - 40,000 to 80,000 RMB (or $6,500 - $13,500). Okay, let's go browse the kitchen section...oh, here are some nice travel mugs...wait, do we have our conversions right, it calculates to $100...nope, I'm not that tired, they really were $100 each. Things have changed and our dollar doesn't go quite as far as it did in previous years. We knew the exchange rate would mean 20% less RMB's, but it seems as if the prices have doubled as well...
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| Garden Koi saying Hello as we enter the garden behind our hotel. |
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| I don't think these fish realized that we didn't have food...they all stayed as close as possible. I'm convinced that they would have come out of the water to grab food out of our hands. |
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| The waterfall behind our hotel. |
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| A cure little welcome area in our hotel lobby. This will make for some nice pictures later when we have Daniel. |
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