McNaughton's China Trip

Hi everybody. We found out that Grandma Janice and Grandpa Dick are following our trip too. Welcome. Grandma -- I tried to respond several times to the email you sent on my birthday but my emails to you kept bouncing back undeliveralbe.

Today we visited the Tengwang Pavillon. Originally built in 653 it is one of three great superstructures south of the Yantze River. This one is named after the then brother of the Emporer who was governor of Hongzhou (now Nang Chang, the city where we are). It sits on the banks of the Gangjiang River, which flows into the Yantze. It's style is from the Song Dynasty. It is nearly 58 meters high and has been destroyed and rebuilt 28 times on the exact same spot. The current one, considered the 29th, was renovated in 1989.
Howard and Liz -- we saw the place where you dressed up in the traditional outfits, but it was really hot and we didn't want to be the 1,823,431st people to use those costumes.





Sarah started out the tour awake today and was very pleasant despite the oppressive heat



Here is Sarah and daddy back in the room cooling off before a great lunch of Kung Pow chicken, broccoli and steamed rice. We eat Chinese food pretty much every lunch and dinner, it's different from the "American" Chinese food we go out for in the States -- a lot more flavorful and there's a lot of regional dishes that are pretty much unrecognizable to us. Some other dishes we recognize (like chicken feet) but we'd rather not. The restaurants we go to have picture menus so we just point and eat!!


If anyone is wondering what time it is where we are, we are 12 hours ahead of Eastern. So when we went to b'fast at 7 a.m. this morning (Saturday, 2 Sep) it was 7 p.m. Friday night for those of you in the Eastern time zone, 6 p.m. for Central and so on. We talked to Pete and Sue today before lunch, noon our time, 10 p.m. the night before for them. We heard Micky scored a touchdown, congratulations!! Actually Friday happened 12 hours earlier here so we already knew he was going to score, but we didn't want tell Micky and the rest of the folks watching the game so they'd be surprised. :-) (If you think I'm serious, you need to sit in a dark room with a cool damp washcloth on your head).


Jesse -- here's the warrior's dagger we bought for you today!


We went to McDonald's tonight just to see if it was the same. Pretty close, but my Quarter Pounder had cucumber slices on it and the special sauce was kind of spicy.
We're going to visit a country village tomorrow which will be our last full day here then Monday we'll be off to Guangzhou.