China - Part 17, Yuexiu Park... the 1st time!

I haven't forgotten about finishing up the photo album of our trip to China, but with lots of stuff going on, it seems to always get pushed to the back burner.

Never-the-less, I will get them all finished.  Since we're up to Guangzhou now, it won't be too many more posts before it's all wrapped up.

Part 17 is our second day in Guangzhou.  This was Sunday and spawned this post initially. I may update this post later on as I've sent a request to one of the other adopting families who we went to church with to see if I could get a couple of photos from them since we failed to take our camera that morning.

There was a nap by momma as she was not feeling great, but I woke her up around 4:30'ish and we talked about what we wanted to do.  We decided that we wanted to take a walk to Yuexiu Park in search of the 5 goats statue, and even more so, an excuse to get out of the hotel, which was starting to feel a little cramped with the four of us.

This is down on the road/curbside, just outside of our hotel... well, and maybe down a block or so.  The roads are wide enough and the traffic crazy enough that you will likely perish trying to cross above ground here.  So, they designed this underground passageway that will take you to about 5 or six different destinations, depending on how you interpret the signage.  We did pretty good with that part and the Yuexiu Park is pretty well marked.  You can go down to the level we went to and simply walk to whatever corner you wish to come back up at, or you can proceed even further into the belly of the earth and ride the metro. We didn't.

That is our hotel after we resufaced.  The smaller, two story building in the foreground and partially obscured by the trees, is a strip mall of sorts.  That's where the McDonalds was in proximity to us as well as a jewelery store, clothing, and a bunch of other crap that we did not care about.  That recessed U shape of the hotel is where our swimming pool was located, which was up on the fourth floor above the restaurant.

This here is also our hotel from a different angle.  This photo proved to be a life saver when later on, we got lost in the park, which is rather large we found out, and Lesley happened to notice this building with that little symbol above the Chinese writing just right of center in the photo.  She went scrolling back thru all of the pictures we had just taken on the camera and found the two of our hotel, and by the grace of God, we knew which way to go to get back to our hotel. After dark. On a street with about another 1000 people on it. With two hungry kids. That are tired...   A life saver, I tell ya.

This is quite obviously inside the park.  The little paddle boats were for rent but we did not do that.  Sounded like an awful lot of work having been away from a fellas own bed for over two weeks at that point.

Hiking the trails and taking in the beauty of it all.

This was up on top of one of the bigger hills in the park.  I'm not really sure what the point of it was, but there were a few tables and benches around so probably just a fine place to relax after the hike up.

I believe this may have been about where everything went wrong.  We went down the steps here and used my sense of direction, which is usually spot-on, and wound up on the opposite side of the park from our hotel.  In my defense, there is a lot of water passages thru the park so the paths must follow them and there are not tons of places to turn at.

Here we are, after dark, wrong side of the park and knowing it!  Dad's still smiling but the boys do not seem to be.  If I recall correctly, Robby was upset that after all of this time walking, we still had not found a place to play football.

It's blurry, but it's one of the few shots at dusk that sort of turned out. I've spoke of them before, but there are multiple elevated roads in this city, with elevated round-a-bouts, plus you can see the old-style cables for the cable cars that still run.

This was one of the few times when nobody was coming at us on this narrow sidewalk, so I snapped a shot.  People on bicycles would come flying out of the darkness at you, buses would pull up along the road and empty 30 people out right in front of you, or there would be 20 - 30 people waiting to get on a bus that you had to navigate thru.  All in all, it was a pretty fun walk and a little bit exhilarating to sort of be lost in China!

This is the underground again.  Those black and white signs just above center in the photo are the pertinent signs for people like us. If you paid attention on the way down the steps (from off of the street level) the entry point was marked with a letter. You followed the signs back to your letter and everything was good.  If not, I would imagine that you would give up and simply get a job at one of the many stores that are down here.

Ahhhh... back in the room after eating some room service.  That desk is where I did my blogging from. Also note that Robby is still at the room service cart eating.  :-)  That's my boy!