A day in Liu Zhou

It took us some 2 hours to finally arrive at what had been Kate's orphanage and is now a nursing or old age home in the non descript town of Liu Zhou which means near the forest. OUr guides are always talking about what the government is doing for the people; parks, holidays, gigantic buldings, etc. And in this case it's my idea that the Governmentkis also building 4 lane highways in all these towns and consequently there is some similarity among some of these places. We take the Liu Zhou exit and then start frantically calling to figure out the location of the orphanage/old age home. It's way off the beaten track past several factories, a mountain of refuse and other industrial wastes. This is not going to be the Eureka moment for Kate. The Director has not been available by phone for several days, the head of nursing who comes out to geet us looks to be 12 and is not specially interested in our visit. She tells us that none of the files are available and that all of the staff has scattered. We are invited to take a look at Kate's old quarters but they are now a parking garage amid a sprawl of a pleasant enough interconnecting one story yellow buildings. There are no answers to our carefully crafted list of questions and no possibility of ever seeing the files. Finish

Kate and I dissolved into tears of anger and frustration. But then we drove onj to Kate's finding location which was a local police staion. I hadn't realized that I even had this information until just before we left for China and this was a great find. The police were really nice and seemed interested in our quest for information although they said that all the police had retired 5 years ago. But we were able to take pictures of Kate at the police station.

So much for all that. Then our guide suggested a quick lunch at a local restaurant. We actually went native and stopped at a roadside restaurant where they cooked in an open stall and everybody eats at tiny roadside tables sitting onj small plastic stools. Our guide took one look at the stalls and said, We go to the crowded one because the food will be better. We sat ourside and ate a steaming bowl of noodles in broth spicy with red peppers which were so slippery because I'm not that ept with chop sticks so I was practically wearing my lunch. In the end I had to toss my white shirt and white pants which were freckled with red oil.

This was really a case of food being a restorative and we all felt better about our day. We also felt better once we got back to the hotel and hit the swimming pool.

By this time Arnie seemed to be in increasin pain from a groin pull that was moving around to back.

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