Day 10: We moved!

*** TODAY'S TISSUE FACTOR (TTF) , 2 out of 10 ***

I'm happy to say this blog is coming to you from the Guangdong Victory Hotel, on their complementary in-room PC none-the-less!

Last night I contacted our Guangzhou host Molly and told her of the terrible room and that we'd like to move to the hotel that we originally asked to stay. She told me she'd get back to me. So I tossed and turned all night trying to get comfortable on this ROCK HARD bed. It was way harder than the one in Beijing, and the pillows were equally bad (hard and super thin) which made matters worse. I think I ended up with about an hour of total sleep and the rest was time spent thinking how ticked I was that we weren't originally able to stay (according to our travel coordinator at the agency) at the Victory hotel.

So Molly got back to me this morning and said it is okay to switch, but the White Swan requires a 24 hour cancellation notice so we'd have to pay for Sunday night too. I was a little peeved since we told her the day before that we wanted to get the heck out of dodge, but I really didn't want to tick off our host, so we'll leave it at that. So now we had a choice. Stay at the hotel that sucks since we've paid $130 for the night, or for the first time in our lives, get two hotel rooms for the same night and not sleep in one of them. We opted for the latter. Our White Swan experience was so bad that if they'd offered to comp our room for our entire stay we still would've moved. That said, I'm now trying to calculate how much they could've offered to pay us to keep our room in that crap hotel. I would've said yes for $90 a night, taken the $90 over to the Victory and rented a room, and then left the lights on and our water running at the White Swan. Our unused room tonight is room 1134. I hope it doesn't "rain" in 1034...hee hee hee. Really I'm just kidding. Al Gore told me to turn off the water and lights, so of course we did. The point is, our room now is great. While we'd love to not have wasted $130, it was worth the double booking for tonight.

Okay...that's it on the room situation. Onto the rest of the day, because there was an interesting cast of characters to say the least. This morning was the usual. No toast today, but the breakfast was fantastic. They had tater tots. We love the tots. We hated our room. You already know how that turns out. Since we're paying for tonight's room, we're going back for our $130 breakfast in the morning. Ireland may experience another potato famine because I'm going to try and eat my money's worth of tots.

At 9:00am we met our host and the other two families that we had met in Beijing last weekend. They had traveled to Inner Mongolia to pick up their children. Anyway, Molly took us on a tour of sites in the city. We went to a famous Buddhist temple. I'm not a Buddha fan, other than to mention in college I had a plaster cast statue of what the Chinese refer to as the "Ha ha (funny) Buddha". A side story about him; when we moved to Austin in 2000, Buddha was tied to the back bumper of our Uhaul by someone who shall remain nameless. After we hit our first bump in the road Buddha blended into the pavement quite nicely. I digress. I learned in my catechism in second grade that "I am the Lord thy God; Thou shall not have strange god's before me". So, of course, I'll go to H-E double hockey sticks if I pray to this strange god (and boy is he strange). But we did go into the temple and have the Buddhist monk say a blessing and sprinkled holy water on us. It didn't burn. WHEW! I will say though that while I didn't believe or understand for that matter what the monk was saying or doing, I still had an amazingly powerful feeling come over me while it was happening. I can't really explain it other than to say it was somewhat similar to that feeling I got after finals every semester in high school and college, or when the final bell rang before Christmas and Spring break. The feeling was both weird and fleeting. My final story of this experience was that during this "sacred" blessing the monk's sleeves hiked up slightly to reveal a Rolex on his wrist. It made me hesitant to donate 10 Yuan to the red box on the alter after the ceremony, but I did anyway because I'm confident the watch was as real as Pamela Anderson's twins, since I perused Rolex watches today on the street by our hotel(s). They're running about $30...maybe $20 with a hard bargain.

After the temple we went to a park. It was pretty, boring...in that order. Then we were taken to a "shopping plaza" as Molly put it. We pulled up and there were two dealerships I had never seen before, a Rolls and Lamborghini dealership. We were taken upstairs from the dealerships to a knick-knack store. I ended up buying a bottle of "wine" at the there. It's called snake wine. Now you've heard of the Tequila (actually Mezcal) that has the worm in the bottle. Yeah, I was an idiot in college and ate the worm after downing close to a half a bottle, but again I digress. So this snake wine was pretty interesting. Guess what was inside of this bottle of booze? Yep...and it's tongue was sticking out too. May I fix you a Snake & Tonic? How about a Snake-tini? Twenty bucks to the first person who takes a legit (1 1/2 ounce) shot of this stuff; straight; no nose holding.

When we got back to the hotel we went to the room, gathered our dirty laundry (I had to chase my jeans down the hall), and brought it to a souvenir shop just outside of the hotel. These types of shops are about every 30 feet apart on every road around the hotel and almost all offer laundry service. I think we had 30 pieces of laundry between the three of us and they said they'd have it finished in 6 hours and it'd be $25. Sold! Cleaning those jeans may have been worth $25 alone for pain and suffering. This store also lends out strollers for free! I picked one up in the morning and all I had to do was give them my room number and tell them when I'd have it back. Incidentally, Isabel loved the stroller. When we'd stop to check something out she'd start to kick her legs as if to say "Giddie up!".

In the early afternoon we found a little cafe a few doors down from the hotel where we grabbed some lunch. Leslie found a table outside while I went in to grab our food. A yogurt, coke, two beers, and a HUGE pig-in-a-blanket was $4. I was heading to our table proudly thinking about our bargain lunch, when I noticed a guy talking to (hitting on?) Leslie. I approached and he said he was an American and asked if he could join us as he was craving a conversation in English. I didn't really care...I thought it'd make a nice story, so I asked him to sit. He was eccentric, and that's an understatement. They guy said he's been teaching English in China, but didn't seem to offer any more description of when & where. I asked him how long he'd been in China and he said since about 2001. He hadn't been back to the states since then and implied that he's basically wandering around southeast Asia with no real place to call home. He didn't look or act homeless...just weird. Almost the entire time I was trying to memorize his face thinking I'd seen him on some Interpol posting or the FBI's most wanted list. He was intentionally vague in his conversation, but fairly pleasant overall. When I mentioned we had to head back to the hotel, he got up, politely said "thank you", and disappeared down the street. He said his name was Ed and he was 56 and from California, and he used to coach high school football. That's about all I know about him. So if he matches a "most wanted" description, he's in Guangzhou. Oh, and he slightly resembled a grey haired Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster) without as high of a forehead, about 7" shorter, not as green (as Herman), and not as dead (as Fred). If you recognize him on a most wanted list, please contact your local FBI office.

As for the "Noodle" as we affectionately call her, she's getting better everyday. If you had told me 7 days ago that we'd be where we are today I would've bet some cold hard cash against it. She's such a little diva and she's becoming more and more expressive by the minute. We wandered through a grocery store and I caught her singing some song I didn't know. Heck, it may not have even been a song, but at least there was sound coming out of her mouth. Later in the room I flipped her upside down, face down and up, backwards, and every which way onto the bed. She giggled and giggled and signed "more, more". She's signing "more" and "please" very consistently now. She also loves to do "high five" and "oh, my!" where she puts her hands on either cheek. There's a great little person inside of her and we love watching her personality emerge. At dinner tonight she was wearing a hooded sweater. The hood would've covered my head and then some, so when I pulled it up and over hers, it came down to below her chin in the front. She started belly laughing. It was so hysterical that I repeated the hood maneuver; she laughed and laughed harder and harder. It lasted about 10 minutes and was joyful to hear. She's also really warming up to her ma-ma. There were multiple times today when she didn't want to let go of Leslie to come to me. As a result, the joy in Leslie's expression is infectious. It feels so great to see her quickly and comfortably slipping into the role of Noodle's mommy.

After dinner I had to pick up our laundry, but it wasn't ready. They said 30 more minutes. So we took Isabel back to the room and put her to bed after a quick bath. I was then back out to retrieve our clean laundry. About half way down the block a woman in a doorway reached out to hand me a card. At first I tried to ignore her, but she basically put it in my hand. Annoyed, I said, "What's this?" She said, "You need massage. A sexy massage, back in your hotel room." WHAT!?!? This was a first. I've only heard about the happy ending...but it's never been offered! Of course I declined and continued to the laundry place. Back in our room with our laundry I shared my encounter with Leslie, and I mistakenly joked about that vacant room we're paying for in the White Swan hotel. I got slap-pushed across the room for that one.

Everyone is fast asleep (it’s 1:40am here). I got a late start on the blog tonight, so I'm going to disappoint some by not posting pictures again for the second day in a row. This time I do have plenty of photos to share, but after an hour of sleep last night I hope you can understand if they're a day late. Goodnight from Southeast China. Enjoy your lunch.