Today we had to get up very early for our bus ride back to Guilin. All was going great and we made it outside for our bus to pick us up, and they sent a ‘bus’ which could have easily fit 7 Chinese people with no luggage, but there was no way this thing could fit 7 of us plus all of our luggage. We ended up getting on a public commuter bus to Guilin that leaves every day. It took us an hour to get to Guilin, and from there it was about a 1-block walk to the train station. We got on our train at around 9:30 I think and it was a 5-hour ride to Nanning, Elita’s hometown. I slept for a decent amount of the train ride since we were up on the Internet all night in Yangshuo. It was cool to see Elita’s face light up as we got closer and closer to her home. It was not so cold when we got there, not cold like any of the other places we had been. It was however colder than it had been, as the day before we arrived it was about 80 degrees.

Our hotel was very nice. It was one of the nicer hotels we stayed in for the trip, and Elita got it down to about $30 a night for a suite. Like in other places in China, there are lots of people that will work for cheap, so at the hotel front counter, they had about 15 people twiddling their thumbs not really doing anything. Internet at the hotel was fast but had a very crappy connection server. It was clearly designed to keep track of time for the dialup accounts and was then ported to work with Ethernet, and there was a popup window that had to remain open for the connection to work. I got my own room at this hotel, and the beds were as hard as rocks again, but I can sleep well on my back in that situation.

That evening we went over to Elita’s house and met her parents. They were very nice and very welcoming. Her dad was very into tropical fish and had two large tanks, one with clownfish and anemones, the other with a variety of delicate saltwater fish. They had lots of candies and fruit for us to eat and they showed us the large wedding photo books that had been made. They were filled with the same images as found on danandelita.com with Chinglish and some random Chinese poems written on each page. From there we headed to a very nice restaurant downtown Nanning called the Seafood Tower Hotel or something like that. The bottom three floors were all private restaurant rooms with the bottom being an aquarium and hotel lobby. Next-door was a very large aquarium with many different types of live fish. Instead of looking at a menu, Elita’s father went downstairs next door and picked out the live seafood that we would eat. They then prepared the meal and brought it to our room. It was again a large round table with Lazy Susan, but the utensils, chopsticks and china was all top notch. There were couches and a big screen TV in the room, as well as a private bathroom. I don’t remember the specifics of what we ate, but it was all very good. I remember eating way too much and feeling very full afterwards. When we were done, we walked downstairs and across the parking lot to the larger aquarium to check it out. Elita’s father showed us what we had just eaten. They also had for display, two very large sea turtles, each in their own tank. As of writing this I have not looked at the video from this place, but it will be online soon.