Tuesday May 29 Guangzhou

Well, today is our 41st wedding anniversary and I get to call Diane both today and tomorrow to wish her a happy anniversary. Here it is May 29 and tomorrow it is May 29 in B.C.  You can only legitimately do that twice for the same date when you are on the other side of the world.  Kind of different because now you can't forget it for two days in a row!  My days are getting so mixed up!


We couldn't get together with J until 11 o'clock and had to check out of our hotel by noon, so we booked another night at the Elan Hotel quite close to the Guangzhou Railway Station.  We found out later we couldn't catch the train to Hung Hom from this station, but had to go the East Guangzhou Railway station.

J arrived promptly at 11 a.m. at our hotel room and after some introductions, we decided we would take the subway to China’s largest zoo with over 400 species of animals and 40,000 species of birds.  Matthew was pleased he got to see real live elephants, fed the giraffes, saw white tigers, golden tigers, rhinoceros, hippos, antelope, monkeys and so much more.  He talked a mile a minute with J who is shorter than Matthew.  It didn't work out for Matty to go to English class at the school which was disappointing.  But 8 hours with J was great as his English is very good and Matty took advantage of that.  It was a really good day.

Coming home on the subway was very crowded as subways usually are around 6.  Jimmy had an appointment at 8 p.m. so was not able to share an evening meal with us.  We said our farewells and then Matthew and I went looking for supper.  The first place we tried, the menu was in Russian, Mandarin and some English.  The pictures depicted large pupae of some insect, a variety of bugs and other things that didn’t look very appealing, plus donkey meat with fish smell(?).  There was nothing on the menu we were dying to eat so we left and found a more upper class restaurant.  We looked at the menu before going in and found a cheese-baked sweet potato and cowboy steak.  Well, the potato was very good, but the steak was a quarter inch thick and half bone and may have had 2 ounces of meat on it (4 bites).  Well, that was it for supper.  With two coca colas, it came to $175RMB, one of the more expensive meals we have had in China.  We’ll do better in Hung Hom tomorrow.  It’s the Cantonese name for Hong Kong.

Theconstant in and out of air-conditioned buildings has left me with a head cold and now I’ve lost my voice.  Great!  How will I make myself understood now?  Matthew will have to take over and he’s doing quite well with his Mandarin.  We got into one taxi and I began looking for icicles inside the vehicle.  It was cold!