Travel day to Maoming June 21

The plan is to fly into Guangzhou, then take a train to Maoming and follow the same travel as Margaret and I did 10 years ago to get Ali. There are no airports in Maoming, even though it is an industrial city. I wanted Ali to experience how we got here. All good intentions
As easy as our flight was to Shanghai, our travel day started just the opposite. After wolfing down breakfast at 6am for Amy to meet us at 6am, we made it to the Old Shanghai airport (built in the last 10 years) in less than 20 minutes. Bused to the tarmac to the plan, all is good. We sit and sit and sit. No explanation for the delay, 90 minutes passed and we finally take off. No one was upset like they would have been in the states, no one questioned why the delay. As the only westerners on the plane, we followed course. Quite the different response Americans would have had for such a delay. (Including myself). Obedience and cooperation was certainly displayed. We landed in Guangzhou and were suppose to take our luggage for storage to the White Swan Hotel. (President Nixon stayed there when China opened their doors to the US).
Bait and switch begins, patience is tested and I failed miserably, probably because I made all the arrangements and everything untangled. Our guide Anna didn’t have a handle on what needed to be done. We needed to store our luggage because the train to Maoming because the train is very small, so we all down sided our luggage to bare minimum. After speaking to her office several times, Anna found a hotel next to the train station to store our luggage, We had to trust this was okay, no other options, had no prior information about the hotel what so ever.
Then the long brutally hot walk to the train station. I thought I was going to bake. The train station is not safe. Lots of beggars, and pick pockets, you have to walk swift and close together. I was most concerned about Kimmie and Ali. They stayed close and but we were all challenged in staying together, as people push and shove, and Anna kept moving fast ahead of us. I would holler at her to wait and she would but it wouldn’t last long. That added to the stress, as it challenged us to stay together. People so close to you, pushing and shuffling, up long flights of stairs, with our luggage, down long flights of stair, concerned about pick pocketers, keeping Ali and Kimmie close, very very stressful.
Then we get thru all this and Anna informs us we have different seats in the train then I ordered. We were to have sleeping compartments like we did in 1988. Jim through a casket. More stress….BUT after we finally got settled in our tiny seats 3 and 3 facing each other, we made lemonaide out of lemons. The scenery was amazing. As we got out of Guangzhou, the country side changed from buildings to rice patty fields. The housing structures have changed considerably in the last 10 years. New housing replaced by new. Some of the housing were just small shacks, with stick roofs. The girls jaws were dropping. We saw people working in rice patties, with their water buffalo, tiny little towns that were just agricultural.

As the only Westerners on the train, we drew lots of attention. As Jim pulled out his rubix cube to pass the time,several young men gathered around him to watch him solve the puzzle. Ali became an expert in solving the rubix cube, quite the task for an 10 year old. A baby with her mother and grandmother sat next to us. We found out the baby is 10 months old, and they are from Maoming. The mother let me play with the baby, she was so well behaved, in fact there were lots of children on the train, and you wouldn’t even know it, they were perfect travelers. One young women, put her hand on Jim’s and said “ Welcome to to China” in English and struck a small conversation with us, asking about the girls and if they were Chinese. She was so pleasant. Telling us America is beautiful and we replied that China is beautiful.
Since the flight was so delayed, we had no time for lunch. We stopped off at a 7/11 and got snacks and water. Our day of food is the Maoming diet… crackers, and liquid.
We almost missed our stop in to get off the train, as the train was 35 minutes early. We left a bag of Kimmie’s on the train with a book she read, but were lucky that was all, because we were so rush to get through the crowed, standing room only, train compartment.
Yorkee our Maoming guide met us, and quickly explained to us, she got a call from her office about us wanting the sleeping compartment for the train. She made arrangement for that to happened, of course with a monetary upgrade.
Our hotel is fine. The bathrooms are funky. The shower is a corner next to the toilet, no separation. Everything gets wet. No big deal, but different… a hot shower is a hot shower. We all feel fast asleep… a good nights rest.