From Mike:  another enjoyable experience in Guanghzou. Yesterday due to the rain all events were cancelled and we had the day to ourselves. This would have been bad if the weather hadn't lifted around 10 a.m. and the rest of the day was nice even as everything was wet. We were able to get out and walk around the island where our hotel is located. We went into a number of shops are started to look for gift ideas for certain family members who shall remain nameless. There is the usual assortment of poorly made tourist gifts but if you look hard enough you can find some really cool, unique gift ideas.

Sunday is apparently exercise day as we came upon groups of elderly people doing a wide variety of games. There were groups of 4 to 5 playing hackey sack, others were dancing to a makeshift karaoke band (the singing was awful and really hard to listen to), others walking, and then the random old person walking around doing arm circles or air push ups. I even watched two people swim in the Pearl River. One guy in particular kept swimming out into the current while doing the breat stroke. When he wanted a break he would get out of the current. This is a port town and you can imagine the pollution in the river even though China does it's best to keep things clean. When I saw the guy spit out the water I did gag a bit.

During this time, groups of youngish students kept coming up to me wanting to talk in English. I figured that it was that to them I looked exotic or whatever so they wanted to speak to "the American" tourist. I mean, I have lost 5 pounds since I've been in China. Turns out I was wrong and my ego was deflated. Jodi got the story from one of the many groups that approached us that day. They were University students taking English and their assignment was to come to the island and practice converstional language. Every time we were stopped, and it was often, someone would pull out a little book and have a number of questions already written down. Then they took video or a picture of the exchange as proof.

That evening, to soothe my bruised ego, Jodi took us to a restaurant that is well known for inexpensive but authentic food. The restaurant, loosely translated to "North East People" served the cuisine most commonly found in Jinan. The servers spoke no English but the menu has each item pictured and Jodi's limited Chinese was enough. to make sure we got what we wanted. And the food was great. Even Eli got into it eating his own Giaozi (Steamed bread dumpling). He ate over 3/4 of it which was the same size as a hamburger at most American restaurants. And that is not all that he ate; he also consumed two smaller pork dumplings. We also had greens wrapped with tofu skin served with a spciy meat sauce, our own order of pork dumplings, and sweet potatoes served in a mountain with melted sugar. You had to eat that one quick before the sugar hardened making it diffult to get the pieces of sweet potato apart. By far, the best meal I have had since being in China that was not street food.

Tonight we are going out for authentic Cantonese food. I have no idea what that is but I am excited to try it.