Saturday, February 26, 2005
Hello Guangzhou...
...or may I call you Canton? It's strange how we still refer to Cantonese cuisine and Pekingese dogs when the romanized spellings of the source cities have long since been converted to the more accurate Beijing and Guangzhou using standard Pinyin. Anyway, here we are in the Guangdong Victory Hotel. The telephone number is +86 20 8121 6688 and we are in room 8406. Again, please see the "Telephones" post from a couple of weeks ago for a reminder of the time zone differences if you want to call us. As in Nanchang we have free broadband internet in the room, so blog updates and low-cost phone calls with Skype are possible. You can make a quick cheap call to the room and we can call you back. The switchboard operator speaks enough English to put you through.
At the hotel we reunited with Bob from the agency and the other two group members who have adopted in different provinces. Everyone seems to be doing very well, and it was good to see them all again. Late tonight the husband of one of our lone travelers will arrive. He is flying in from the US at short notice (and considerable cost) to support her as she continues to deal with her baby's medical issues.
Today we have established:
(1) that Chloë is happy to fly. She played with me happily throughout the hour-long flight from Nanchang this afternoon. Some light turbulence bothered me more than it bothered her. This is a comfort given the gruelling 3-leg 22-hour journey we face on Friday.
(2) that Chloë is a big fan of Thai food. We had a group dinner tonight in a Thai restaurant adjoining the hotel. It seems like she ate and drank more in one meal than she has had over the entire week. I think we will be frequenting our local Thai restaurant.
Yesterday evening Stacy finally succumbed to the same stomach bug that has afflicted most of us at some point during our time in Nanchang. She was over the worst of it by the wee hours, and was a weary but game traveler this morning. She was exhausted when we got to the hotel and went straight to bed, so just Chloë and I dined with the rest of the group. We don't know if it's the water (not that we drink from the tap) or the food, or whether we have caught it from the babies or from each other, but everyone has had more or less the same symptoms. Fortunately no family has had both parents down at the same time: I had my session in the bathroom on Wednesday night.
More on the Guangzhou experience soon.
