I’m very tired sitting here in my very small room in the Mandarin Garden Hotel in Nanjing. It was a bit of an adventure getting here. The bottom line is we have way too much luggage. We had 7 pieces plus 4 carryon’s, and my Mom had 3 pieces. The train station is crazy! We hired porters to help, and they charged us a pretty extorted fee! Then we didn’t have transportation from the train station to the hotel in Nanjing. So again we got robbed by some porters, who led us to two cars that were not licensed taxis. Then we paid the porters thinking they were the taxi drivers but they ran with the money. We then could hardly pay for the real drivers… We finally made it to the hotel, but it was kind of crazy! We will manage to ditch at least 3 of the bags in Nanjing (Juergen has been saying this for weeks – he was right). These three are mostly gifts for the children’s home, nannies, etc. I think we will also hire a van to take us back to Shanghai. The train ride was fine, but getting on and off the train with all those bags was ridiculous!
Nanjing looks like a Chinese München! It is a very cool, very old city! Heidelberg is so small and quaint compared to this happening town! Wow is this place nice. We get a tour tomorrow. I think I’m going to be very impressed!
I am not impressed with the Mandarin Garden Hotel. They put us in some very tiny rooms (that looked ‘quite’ different than the pictures on the internet). We managed to upgrade one of the rooms so we actually all have beds. (you must recall that Juergen found this web site with the super deal for these rooms. Hmmm …. You get what you pay for?).
I’m glad Nanjing is such a great city. Our guide will pick us up on Monday at 8.40 and at 9.00 we will meet Sarah. Tomorrow we are going to check out the neighborhood which I understand is awesome.

Juergen’s comments: Wow, now I get to write on this blog (my first lines)! I was thinking of correcting all the latest posts that Amy did about me … just kidding. They are mostly true :-) . The train ride was truly an adventure and I feel a little naïve to have tried this on our own. The tickets were about 50 Euros for all of us but we had to pay another 150 Euros (a lot of money in China!) to bail us out of there (details above). So it is like they say when they do crazy commercials on TV in the U.S.: “These are trained professionals. Don’t try this at home… “. But it was absolutely worth the adventure. If I was just by myself I would be a lot more daring to go out and about here but with a big family you have to play it safe.
We still cannot access our blog here in China since it is one of the servers blocked by the government. So we are posting these stories ‘blind’. Hope it all comes out ok.

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