Our day in Guiping City....Thursday

Hello from GuiPing City, China.

Today we met Phoebe to go to the newer SWI (orphanage), older orphanage, etc. I won't go into too many details to respect Anna's privacy. However, I will say this.....no child should have to wait for a family and someone to love them. If your heart feels at all led toward adoption, I would love to talk with you. Barry's sister has a daughter from China and we are very grateful for Angi's nudging and also for Logan's. They were both quite instrumental in our adoption process.

Anyway.....it was a very emotional morning, but a necessary one on this trip. We went shopping at a few local places and then had lunch with our guide and driver. We went to the same place as last night since it was so good and the guide really didn't seem to think any other place was suitable. When we arrived, Phoebe said " Well, here are the movie stars again". That means Barry and I .  LOL

We went back to the hotel to rest, as we were exhausted from the morning and it is extremely hot here. Guangxi is one of the most southern provinces. The capital city is two hours from the capital city of Thailand, Bangkok. It is also two hours from Vietnam, I believe. It never snows here and gets very warm. VERY humid. You walk around for 10 minutes outside and Barry and I are just dripping in sweat. Anna doesn't sweat, however.

After we rested a while, I felt we needed to get out and find something nice here and pretty to kind of find some closure to this city. Guiping City is not doing well and there isn't much to see, but it is surrounded by mountains so that helped. NO foreigners ever come here unless they are looking for the same kind of closure that we are. The hotel is beautiful and we walked around outside the hotel and found some goodies for people back home. We found this area to be quite nice around the hotel.

Here are a few pictures from our day

                         

Anna gave Mrs. Yang, who is seated, a book of pictures from the last ten years. She is the director of the orphanage. She enjoyed seeing the pictures and Phoebe told her about our yearly reunions with the other 9 girls from our 2005 travel group. 

                                             Mrs Yang gave Anna a large Chinese knot

                                                        Next 11 pictures were taken at our hotel

                                                                       

                                      This is the inner part of the hotel that I did not show last night.

This last picture was taken at the entrance to the local mountain nearby.

Tomorrow we head back to Guilin, China. It is a 6 hr drive, but it is all in the mountains. Some curves, but beautiful landscapes everywhere. Not looking forward to the rickety van again, however! We will fly tomorrow night to Hong Kong and sleep there. Saturday morning we take that lovely 14 hour plane ride back to the states. We will sleep at a connecting hotel and fly back home Sunday afternoon on a little 8 passenger plane again. We miss our two sons, so we are very anxious to see them!