Friday, May 25, 2012

Day 1 in Guiyang

Hello all, David here ...  I still haven't signed up for a VPN yet, so I am emailing these posts to our blog ...  Maybe tomorrow I'll have time to set all that up so we can post some pictures ...

For those that are wondering, we are at the Novotel Downtown Guiyang.  We really are right in the middle of the town.  It is a new, European-style Hotel, pretty spacious and very accommodating.  We have an over-sized pack-n-play like thing for Hannah and she is very happy and comfortable sleeping in it.  If we need to, we have room for another one for Andrew; we'll just have to see what works best for him ...  The room only has a shower (no tub), but the Hotel has provided us with a large baby bath tub (Hannah was glad to see that, she is not yet ready to do the whole shower thing).  Our guide is Michael and he is taking very good care of us.

OK, so today Michael, took us to the Bird and Flower market.  Really, it should be named the "Everything you can think of is for sale" Market ...  We saw birds, bunnys, gerbils, guinea pigs, puppys, dogs, flowers, plants, fish, aquatic plants, turtles, all kinds of dried dog and bird food as well as live meal worms and earth worms, tools, tea pots, fishing gear, furniture, and all kinds of dried herbal medicines.  The list could go on, but you get the idea - I have pictures that I'll try to post tomorrow ...  Lois has a friend, Chia,  that lives about 2 hours from here and she came down to see us today.  We met at the market and had lunch - a good old fashioned Guizhou lunch of local individual stir-fired dishes; even with all the variety, Hannah just ate rice.  Afterwards we brought Hannah home for a nap (OK, so I took one too :>)  Lois and Chia went downstairs and had a good time catching up.  This evening we went to the "Pizza Fun" restaurant, a western wanna-be restaurant that had a buffet that included pizza, a salad bar and then some more traditional Chinese food.  They also had ice cream.  We were hoping we could find something there that Hannah would like to eat.  After trying a couple of things she finally settled on spaghetti.  We are having a hard time finding things Hannah will eat - seems we've done too good a job assimilating her into the American culture ...  We did buy some peanut butter this evening for those occasions when she just won't eat ...

Tomorrow afternoon, Lois' good friend and past Chinese teacher, Molly, is coming from Nanning with her 6 year old daughter Wu Yi, they will be here for a few days.  So things have been a bit busy.  We will not do anything special tomorrow - maybe just walk around outside the hotel and explore a little bit.

That's what our day looked like; and now we are having a hard time keeping our eyes open so we will call it a night.

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