Day 2 in Guiyang

Hey, David here.  Still haven't had time to set up the VPN, so no pictures yet, sorry ...  I'll have to do that tomorrow so we can post pictures of Andrew on Monday :>)  We did get a slight correction on the schedule today, he is coming at 2:30 instead of 2:00 ...

We decided to take the morning to explore around our Hotel and see if we could find the Walmart.  You know, Walmart's in China don't look anything on the outside like they do in the US.  They are generally very nondescript buildings with little to no signage indicating that you are actually at the Walmart.  In this case, we had to walk into a park and over a flower-bed retaining wall and down 3 flights of stairs to enter the Walmart via the Emergency exit (apparently, they are working on the main entrance and have it completely closed off).  It appears that the Walmart here is underneath a very large park, so not only is there no nondescript building, it's hidden underground ...  Very clever ...  We did finally find the Walmart and were able to buy some bread and crackers to go with the peanut butter we bought last night.  When we got back to the Hotel, Lois' friend, Molly, from Nanning was waiting for us in the lobby (we weren't expecting her until early afternoon); and when we got to our room Jenny (one of the exchange students that our church hosted last year), was waiting for us at our  room.  We were a little unprepared to have everyone show up at the same time ...  We explained that we really needed to feed Hannah and put her down for a quick nap, and decided to regroup a little later.

After Hannah woke up, we met everyone and headed to Qianling Park (or Monkey park as it is affectionately called around here).  There are monkeys all over the park and they are not very bashful when it comes to begging or stealing food ...  The park itself is huge (over 1000 acres), one of the largest city parks in China (at least I think that's what I read somewhere).  It was a lot of fun, but we were exhausted when we left there ...  After a bit of an adventure looking for a recommended restaurant for dinner (that we never did find), we settled on a local Jiaozi place (Chinese dumplings or pot-stickers).  It was very good and cost the equivalent of $8 to feed all 5 of us :>)

We are now back at the hotel and Lois and Hannah have both crashed pretty hard.  I am about to join them :>)