Wow. Seriously, I have never seen such a wide variety and such a large quantity of food. We helped ourselves to scrambled eggs, hash browns, veggie rice, sausage, pastries, and cheeses.
Next, we began our adventure by taking the airport express train into downtown Hong Kong. There we caught the train to Guangzhou. Everything to that point had been very westernized... A lot of English and diversity.
Guangzhou was a little different. There is definitely less English, but we still found out lunch at McDonalds. A guide met us at the Guangzhou East train station and after we dropped off another adopting family at their hotel, we were escorted to the Guangzhou South train station.
Our guides, Jack and Dani, were great. Dani is a college student, and I think we were her first assignment. I think she was amused by my Mandarin phrase book but helped me with a few pronunciations.
And I forgot to mention, Guangzhou is hot. No... Sweltering... It's like South Carolina on a humid day in July... But it is April.
The Guangzhou South train station is huge and crowded. We quickly learned to forget about personal space. If you allow an inch between yourself and the person in front of you, ten people will push in front of you.
Also, if someone seems confused and takes to long at a task, the Chinese way seems to be to scream at the person with a bullhorn. I'm not sure how that helps, but the flustered travelers did seem to pick up the pace. I told Todd that maybe we should scream at Ava in English. She might feel at home.
We made it to Changsha. The bullet train was fun! But in true Ch:nese fashion, everyone tried to both leave the train and new passengers board at the same time.
Todd wants me to mention smells. There are many odd smells and many good ones. Some of the food smells amazing, some smells different. The people who wear cologne have great taste and smell divine. Others have some serious b.o. But with the way I was sweating, so do I.
Our guide here seems really nice. She helped us settle in at our hotel. The buffet at dinner would have sent PETA into a tizzy. Whole turtles, frog tongues, and goose wings, oh my! The fried rice was really good.
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