26 July 2006 - Guangzhou, China - 3:45 p.m.
The flight went a lot better than I figured... Christina took us to the airport, and she had her own flight to catch. She took us as far as the metal detectors, and left, and of course Kai Hong started crying, but only for about 5 minutes, then was in good spirits, so that was a lot better than I expected. The only crying on the plane was when my mom tried to get her to put her seatbelt on, which she refused to do (unsurprisingly... it'll be fun getting her to do that in the states... nobody here wears them, which is weird, with how insane the driving is... but then again, I still have not seen a single accident).
The flight was one of the most turbulent I've been on, and on the way down in Guangzhou, the landing gear (I'm just guessing here) came out a little rough, because there was a big scraping sound from underneath the plane, and all the emergency exit signs immediately came on, and they did some annoucement in Chinese and English like they did everytime we had turbulence, but I couldn't understand it at all, so I was freaking out, thinking we were about to crash... But everything was fine.
We arrived, got taken to the White Swan Hotel (Richard Nixon's worldwide favorite, circa 1985!), which is apparently the traditional place people go when they adopt Chinese children, not only is there a playroom downstairs just for the kids, but every adopting family gets a free Barbie, a "souveneir presented by Mattel to adopting parents of Chinese orphan children staying at the White Swan Hotel" says the back of the box. And I guess they make a lot of them, because there are lots and lots of whitey parents with Chinese kids here, at breakfast in the morning, for the first time since arriving in China, white people are the majority, it's weird. I'm used to being the only white people in the room, haha... So far, it's a very English friendly city, unlike Taiyuan. We can go eat lunch on our own, without a guide to pick things out and order for us, haha.
So last night there was a huge, couple square mile wide laser show, with lasers coming from both towers of a bridge that crosses the Pearl River (which is right outside the hotel... I'll have pictures up soon), a hotel across the river from us, a hotel across a branch of the river from us (we're on the corner of the river and branch), and our own hotel. I'm pretty sure Guangzhou is building a Death Star. Anyway, it was pretty incredible. Besides the lasers, there is lots to see at night, all the riverboats and buildings near the river have lots of different colored neon lights, it's pretty cool looking, without having the tackiness of Vegas... Looking around the city, it kinda reminds me of New Orleans, actually. There is a LOT of trees and plants here, way more than I've seen in any other city. Lots of the apartment buildings (and otherwise) have whole yards on their roofs, with trees, bushes, grass, it looked like even a few had fire pits...
Today we just went and got a medical check up, and ate lunch, and somehow we were all exhausted so we came back to the hotel. Tomorrow we might do some sightseeing, and Friday is more official stuff, and Saturday we are homeward bound... Hopefully the 3 hour flight back to Beijing, the 11 hour flight to San Francisco, the 3 hour flight to Dallas, and the 1 hour flight to Springfield go as smoothly as yesterdays... If it comes to it, we'll just knock her out with some sleepy drugs mom has like we give to my dad, haha...
...TO BE CONTINUED...