Nanning

Getting caught up on my China posts... At the end of our trip the internet didn't work most of the time. Had a wonderful trip and I can't wait to share lots of photos!

Today was a full day in Nanning. Nanning is the capital city of Southern China. It is very green and humid. Still very crowded like Beijing. Our first stop this morning was an orphanage. They held a welcoming ceremony for us. A few orphanage directors were in attendance and gave speeches. The orphanage children performed two dances for us and then some children from our group performed a variety of talents. The children were so excited to perform their dances for us. They passed out fruit, but it soon became a game of banana's turned into guns. They loved seeing the pictures I had taken on my camera of them.  

After the speeches and performances were done all the children from our heritage group put red ink on their hands and filled an album with all their hand prints and names. 

We felt like famous people after the ceremony was finished. Their were camera crews and interviewers everywhere. We snuck away for a few minutes and found rooms full of little children eating lunch. We didn't want to intrude so we just watched them for a little bit, waved, and took some photos. I wish we could have stayed longer and played with them.

 We were served lunch at the orphanage. We had some free time after lunch so a few families decided to be brave and explore Walmart while the rest of the group returned to the hotel.

Lots of strange strange things in Walmart. I did find some familiar things though like Pringles! Funny story.... We were trying to find the bathroom in Walmart so we followed the signs with the boy and girl on it. No luck. Well an older couple were watching us and were trying to help us. So hard to communicate in this country. They ended up showing us to the bathroom which was two stories down, through a parking garage and down a hallway. We never would have found it without them. Such a nice old couple! All of the families stuck together as we left Walmart and walked back to the hotel. We thought it was just a few blocks from the hotel... 45 minutes later we finally made it to the hotel, barely in time for our next excursion. Turns out we took a wrong turn... Now we can say we got lost in China! Oh and the humidity in Nanning is pretty high so we were drenched by the time we got back to the hotel.