Tuesday, August 14, 2007

We've arrived in Nanjing

We took a short flight today to Nanjing - only about 45 minutes. It was nice after all the traveling we've been doing the last few days. Nanjing is even nicer than I remember it. They've been doing a lot of construction (I know - I say this about every city) - but they've also renovated some of the stores on the main street near the Central Hotel. Things look much newer and nicer. I remember when we were here in January 2001, there was a lot of people begging on the streets, but we haven't seen one person begging today. It may just be the time of day we were out. I guess we'll see over the next couple of days.

The Central Hotel is quite nice, but our rooms are much smaller than the one we had 6 years ago. They are still ver clean and the hotel is definitely nicer than the one in Nanchang and Chengde.

Tomorrow, we travel to Avery's hometown of Changzhou. We are the only family traveling there (there are 3 families traveling to Yangzhou) but its not very far - about 1.5 hours each way. They've planned a special "Nanjing traditional banquet" for us tomorrow evening at the Confucious Temple. I remember it very well from last time - there were tons of little stalls along the river and tons of shopping! Judy - you'll remember the place I think - lots of Chinese decorations and beautiful scenery.

We found out this evening that the Civil Affairs Dept of Jiangsu knows about our homeland visit and would like to meet with us. So we will be visiting the Nanjing orphanage on Thursday afternoon where the children living there will do a presentation for us. We're feel very honoured that they would go to all this effort for us. Will definitely post pictures on Thursday evening.

That's it for now - will post about our Changzhou visit tomorrow night.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Smaller? How can the rooms be any smaller? YES - I remember the lanterns. Glad you were able to see Quin's 1st home. Very interested to see Changzhou. The internet will definitely be much better than when Tom and I were crammed in the "business centre" 6 years ago trying to upload the digital photos!