Goodbye Zhengzhou

I started packing to leave Zhengzhou the day before we left and it made me feel good. You know the "vacation" isn't going so great when you are excited to leave. It wasn't the town itself - it was just so HOT that you couldn't do anything - especially with Olivia in poor health because of the heat in Beijing. I wasn't taking any chances, and most of the other families stayed inside also. Also, the food was very foreign. I KNOW it was supposed to be foreign - we're half-way round the world in China. BUT - when you are hungry and you sit down at a restaurant with 2 small kids and the menu features "chicken feet in garlic" and "fish heads in ginger" as the star entrees... how are you going to feel?? I ordered  sauteed chicken in ginger for Olivia and thought I'd be safe with that. But, when it came, we found our pretty quickly that they had taken a chicken and cut it up, bones and all, and sauteed chunks of it in ginger. It smelled heavenly but there was almost NO meat! It was mostly bone! So, we "did our time" in Zhengzhou. Our guide, Yisha, was great. She kept everyone on track and got all the Chinese paperwork done. The trip to Guangzhou was harder than I expected. It took 7 hours from the Zhengzhou hotel to the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou. Thankfully there was a playground at the gate in the Zhengzhou airport. Wow! The kids loved it!! Olivia slept the entire flight, and Ke Xin couldn't have cared less about the flight. She had toys, Sprite to drink and rice to eat, so she was oblivious. Both kids zonked on the bus ride from the airport to the White Swan. Traveling at night with kids is hard on everyone, so most of us were pretty exhausted by the time we got there at 10pm. Then we found out we had to be up and out the door to the kids' physicals at 8:30am the next morning. I was not a happy camper at all.