Good Morning China!!

Well, we made it to Nanning China in good shape. We met our guide, Jane, at the airport and then she took us to our hotel, the Majestic, also know as the Mingyuan Xindu Hotel. Their claim to fame is it is the only 5 star Hotel in Nanning. It is an ok hotel, definitely not even close to the 4 star hotel we had in Hong Kong, but definately cheaper per night.

We get our daughter this afternoon, about 3:30 - 4:30pm (1:30-2:30am in the states). This morning we are meeting with a Representative from the foundation that is sponsoring the foster care for our daughter so that we can give him a gift for the foster mom and he is going to give us a disk with pics and updated info on Meigan. We are both very excited and also kinda numb.

For those of you coming to Nanning let me tell you a little about my first impression. It is a large city, quite warm and very chinese. There are alot of bikes and motorcycles on the streets as well as cars. There are no general traffic laws obediences except for the red and green light. People cross wherever they would like and 2 lanes often becomes 4 lanes. Yesterday we were waiting at a red light to turn left. well the traffic wasn't moving fast enough for someone behind us, so he pulled out to the left of us and went around us on the the left side (into oncoming traffic) and then went straight through the light instead of turning left. Also the airport is about 40 mins from the city, and the roads are really quite nice, very smooth and wide lanes, and roads. There is a lot of Cement here, not as much as in other cities we've been to, but alot of buildings. most of them seem to be shorter buildings (3-4 floors) but it is polk-a-dotted with many tall buildings throughout the city as well. There is a lot of trees, and green gardens intermixed as well, and we crossed a large river on our way into the city.

Now for our rooms, we have two beds, both twin beds, and if you took a piece of plywood and set it down on a boxspring and covered it with a flat sheet that is what the beds feel like here. Our bed in Hong Kong was firm, but these beds put it to a whole new level. Jodie says she doesn't think they are as hard as some of the ones we have had before. I took my comforter (no top sheet) and layed on it and then folded it on top of me so that I had a little bit of padding to sleep on. I did feel like a burrito though. There are no light switches in the hotels. when you enter you stick your key card in a slot and then you can operate the lights and the air conditioning and what else not by a control panel on the night stand. Our hotel in hong kong was the same way and you could even open and close both set of curtains with the control panel. We do have a tv in our room and it has about 40-45 channels on it, most of them in Chinese or Japanese, I found the cctv9 which is english and then a few others including Bloomberg, National Geographic, BBC, HBO and another movie channel. I did not find ESPN last night, but I didn't look to hard either, usually ESPN here is through the Asia/British version and so you get a lot of soccer and a little of the us sports updates (I saw that the Bears lost in the last few seconds (on MSN.com), stupid Bears). The internet has been great so far, I have been able to log onto both email sites and blogger has not been a problem so far. Our hotel also has a very large outdoor swimming pool, with a bunch of older looking people swimming doggy paddle laps around the pool. There are also two tennis courts, a 4 land bowling alley, billiards tables, table tennis, and a work out center, haven't seen em yet. I will try to update you more as we see more of the hotel and the city.

We are just going to get ready now and go do breakfast, I am so looking forward to having some Boa zi (steamed buns filled with roast pork), this trip I am not worrying about eating vegetarian except I do not want to eat meat unless its my only option. Especially if that meat is D.R.C (dog,rat,cat). Brian

Well have a good day and we will post pics later of Meigan and maybe even a video if we can figure out how. I think I will be able to use the webcam to capture a few seconds and then place it here on the blog. We'll see you all later.