5 August 2007

Travel Day 5 (On to Nanjing) — In China

Posted by BaBa under: Travel .

Today we awoke up early again. We are having trouble getting our days and nights straight. We met our entire group at various times in the breakfast buffet area. We even got to meet Belinda this morning at breakfast. It was nice to visit with the families that are sharing our journey as we are sharing their journeys. I forgot to mention that they had crepes at the breakfast buffet. What a treat. The food here was really good. I could not pass the opportunity to mention good food.

We headed back to the room and completed the small amount of packing that was needed to be ready to fly to Nanjing. We got on the coach and were ready to travel. N and her daughter B went off in search of fake Rolex watches before we left. We were just a couple of minutes late leaving after the purchases from the street vendors that met the coach at the hotel. Street vendors are everywhere in the major cities in China selling fake bags, Olympic hats and Chairman Mao watches.

We arrived at the Airport in plenty of time for the flight. We got a Fanta drink at the Airport and I got to a computer, but did not have time to even update a short line on the blog. Because of the electronic problems, we had been out of touch for 4 days. I did borrow Ralph’s phone at the Airport and called Mom and Dad to tell them we had arrived and were safe. We boarded the plane and had the flight crew trying not to laugh at the crazy Americans.

We arrived in Nanjing and quickly got our bags. We saw Min, our guide, waiting for us, but could not get to her at first. The luggage claim tags for the whole group were lost either at the Beijing airport or on the plane. She was able to explain to the security people and using the boarding cards and luggage tags got us passed out of the secure area. We quickly got on the coach and were on our way to the Mandarin Garden Hotel. We arrived and checked in. When the door was opened, there was a crib in the room and emotions overcame MaMa. The water works started, but they were happy tears. We went about unpacking and getting settled before our meeting in afternoon with Min to go over the next day’s schedule. It was also like magic that when we arrived the computer when plugged into the power here worked. I left it charging while we went to the meeting and returned to find it fully charged.

We retuned to the room and made plans for the evening’s pizza party. We were going to order pizza from Papa John’s and pay the cab fee as a group for delivery. The pizza arrived and we went to Belinda’s room. It was obvious from visiting her room that the air in our room was not working. We decided to change rooms and with help from Belinda and filling the crib, we moved all of our stuff.

We went to Belinda’s room and talked for a good portion of time. It was nice to get to know her better. We enjoyed the conversation. I helped get a link to her yahoo site up on the blog as she could not blogger.com. It is blocked in China and the proxy bypasses do not work. She was relieved to have a small URL (Sheridan’s site) to send to her family. I worked till 11:00pm to get the site updated and kill off over 1000 spam emails. I also got all of the photos downloaded from the cameras and charged all of the batteries. I blackstripped two video tapes for the morning and charged the video camera and batteries for both still cameras.

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