China - Part 15 Shangri-La Hotel in Changchun

As we have pretty much finished up our time in Changchun, we're going to have a look at our hotel and it's immediate surroundings. As you can see by the photos, some of these have the fingerprint smudge that was present during the first part of our orphanage tour.  Such is life.  I guess we can use that as another excuse to go back sometime! :-)

Momma went out and took some photos of the exterior of our hotel on the same morning that the ladies went shopping and doing paperwork, leaving the boys behind in the hotel room.

Our room is up there somewhere, but I can't even recall what floor we were on at this point. 

Our room is on the slanted part of the hotel and you'll see the traffic from our window in a photo or two. I think that green "box" is construction of some sort.  It sort of seemed like every single building had some level of construction going on.  It is funny to me now that while we were in Changchun, I thought our room faced West.  I've been trying to place all of our "places of interest" on aerial maps for a future blog post and I've located the Shangri-La in one of those aerial views.  The little bowed out windows thing on the right of this photo (and better shown on the photo above), face straight South.  Whodathunk it?

This is standing in roughly the same spot as the photo above. It's looking across the street where we would play "human frogger" on our path to the Wally Mart.  The Wally Mart is the blue sign just left of center in the photo and kind of behind the lamp post. You had to enter this building thru a specific street entrance and then go up escalators to the second floor, where the Wally Mart started. WM was on the second and third floors and is where I purchased the bulk of the beers in the Beers Of China post.  The tall building down on the corner there is where the Pizza Hut was located.

Looking Southwest out of our hotel room window.

Looking about straight West from the same window.  Begin noticing in this photo that people park their vehicles on the sidewalks in front of the buildings.  That's a little heads-up from me to you if you're over there walking down the sidewalks and feeling aloof in nature.  You may well get ran over.

And here's the traffic, sadly after rush hour was over, but it's still interesting.  This past weekend, we were over at a the house of a co-worker of my sister Dianne, and I was talking to her husband (I guess he is technically a co-worker as well...) about the traffic in China. He said that when you have to make a left turn, you just do it and people look out for you and nobody gets mad about that stuff.  It's true... and a little frightening for us Americans!  Did anybody pick out the traffic cop in the middle of the intersection down there?  Whatever that dude is paid? It's not enough!

So here we are, finally inside the hotel.  We had the son of one of the ladies in our group (they adopted little Kai) take some photos by the Christmas tree so we could get our Christmas cards ordered thru Snapfish.com while we were still in China.  This was in the main lobby.  I believe the area back behind us was the lobby bar/seating area where the ladies played the piano and zither duets that fascinated me to no end.  The boys are sporting their matching Holt International t-shirts that we purchased last year in La Grand Iowa at the annual adoption picnic.  They look smashing!

Down these steps was some type of night club/bar/lounge.  I went down to see it, but that was about the extent of my curiosity.  That gold leaf display of 3 panels in the stairway, you will most likely see in several other photos.  It's in the background of the Christmas tree photo above, it's on all of the pillars throughout the Shangri-La and so on.  It's carved out of a metal and then the wall they place them on is recessed 3 or 4 inches with lights behind the carvings. Very pretty but I'm sure that was part of the cost of our rooms!

I believe this is taken from nearly the same vantage point as the photo immediately above it. Most likely because of the little ham in the photo...

This is another shot from roughly the same area as the two photos above it.  If you were to proceed all the way down to the end, there was a little hotel store that sold clocks, maps, coffee mugs and stuff like that. There was also a restroom way the heck down there which was annoying at breakfast because you had to walk the length of the hotel midway thru enjoying a plate or three of sausage and bacon.

I would have no idea how to get back to this particular area of the hotel if we were ever back there, but I know it was around the ballrooms and big meeting/banquet rooms.  You can see one of the escalators back by the black area of the wall going up to...  whatever the heck was upstairs.  I think it was more rooms.

And here are my peeps going up those escalators.  The steps in between the decorative hand rails were really pretty but I didn't seem to take a better picture than this one.

When we got upstairs, we walked around a bit and found this huge expanse, dimly lit by four huge chandeliers, with nothing but a lone Christmas tree in it. It was a good reminder that Jesus' birthday was only two weeks away, regardless of how far away it seemed to us at that time.  The  picture didn't turn out all that good but it captured the feeling of seeing it there all alone and provides me a good smile every time I see it.

Again, I would have no idea how to find this stairway again but this area was really cool too. It occurred to me while going through the photos that I should have taken a walk by myself at some point with the sole purpose of snapping pix of the hotel and nothing else.

The little man working it going up those steps.

When you get to the top of the steps, there was a dead-end turn into a big conference room, or you could turn the other way and go down this hallway.  Follow it far enough and you would go past the "health club" or the swimming hole as we knew it, and eventually the elevators.  The woodwork pretty elaborate through-out the hotel but this second floor area probably had the most detail.

This must be when we purchased the swimming hats because both boys are holding them.  As I recall, we were getting a little cabin fever at this point, with Robby's head nearly exploding from the lack of swimming, and we went on this tour of the hotel with the idea of taking photos and finding swimming hats if it was the last thing we ever did.

So we finally make it back to the actual hotel room itself.  Fond memories of this bathroom... no, not for those reasons!  This is the first place we brushed Calebs teeth, gave him a bath, earned his confidence to use the pot, teach him how to wash his hands properly and so on.  Seems like a strange set of memories, but that's immediately what I thought of when I saw this photo.

This is looking down the hallway towards the door.  The first door on the left there is the bathroom. The door on the right hand side (up by the main door) was the closet where the safe was.

The little bar area.  The top two shelves are stuff that comes with the room and is ridiculously expensive.  The main shelf is our box of bottled water and various snacks for the boys for in between the BIG meals (I don't believe we had been to Wally Mart yet though as I had that counter top ORGANIZED!  It was beautiful thing!).

The three acre bed where all four of us slept.

We humored the hotel for the first night and left the baby crib in the room.  We asked them to remove it early the next day when they came to clean.  Calebber is 4.5 years old for Pete's sake!  I did a LOT of journaling sitting on that couch in the back corner there.

This is taken from back by that couch.  It appears as if mom is writing a blogpost about arriving in Changchun, and I have no idea what happened to Robby when these photos were being taken...  I'm sure he was near...

So that's pretty much it for our time in Changchun, sad to say. That is one fantastic buffet that we will be leaving and it was really nice to have 3 families together getting their new family members so we got to know them a little closer than we would have in the big group of people, although that has merit as well.

Hopefully it won't take me as long to get the next "Photo Blog" post up as it did this one (it's been 15 days since the "Caleb's finding spot" post).

As always, thanks for reading and God bless!