The Girls

Coming Home

Last Days in China

xx

White Swan Express

Here we are back at the White Swan! It's wonderful- evoking incredible , deeply beloved memories. It's great to be back here again with Xing Xing showing her all the places we went together the first time, strange in that while there are similarities to our first trip, it's more different than the same. I am grateful to feel so much more experienced as a parent, so the terror of the first trip is not present. The White Swan is also irritating-the surcharges are still outrageously astromonmical and annoying. Still the views are fabulous, Shamian Island is so much fun, the breakfast bar is American in its content and excess, and we are having great fun as a family. The night scene is spectacular! The shopping is fabulous! There are playgrounds and rides. The walking areas are green with plantings and lovely; the European colonial architecture is graceful.

Today was our day for An Lin's visa photo and the medical examination. She hated it only slightly less than her sister.

Our family continues to bond. Here are some pictures of Jie Jie and Xiao Xiao, and, finally, of An Lin and her Baba.

Farewell Nanning

This evening we are leaving Nanning for Guangzhou where we will be taking care of the immigration paperwork for An Lin at the American Consulate. We will be sorry to leave this beautiful green city. We have enjoyed our stay with our routine of a morning outing, then back to the hotel for some lunch and relaxed play time, then a walk in the beautiful park behind our hotel before dinner. Nanning is lovely and relatively relaxed by Chinese city standards. Our wonderful Holt escort Yolanda has been kind enough to take us on some great outings. We have visited the Zoo which is also a beautiful park, the Guangxi Provincial Museum where we saw some mountain minority girls singing, and visited a farming village about one and a half hours out in the spectacularly beautiful countryside. All the excursions were wonderful and the last was my favorite as we talked to many people, mostly mothers with their little children. I was yearning for my medium format camera, but even our little digitals ran out of juice, so I was forced to rely on Xing Xing's Fisher Price, which yielded some interesting results. Here's a photo montage of our stay.......