From what we have heard, the provinces can be quite a bit different from each other depending on how much the local governments have put into their infrastructure. These are comments on the province we went to, Hubei, and some things may or may not apply to other provinces.
We stayed at the Renaissance Hotel (Marriot). The hotel was very nice and offered a great breakfast bar buffet included in the price of the room. We found the room nice but you could not control the temperature and in the winter time in province, we found the room to be warm for our liking. The hotel had a nice indoor pool but no hot tub. There was also a gym but we didn't use it.
The area of the city we stayed in did not have a lot of easy to access places around the hotel for us to go to that we could tell. This left us eating a late big breakfast, skipping lunch, and then going out on adventure for dinner. We did not get any taxi's while in Wuhan. Fortunately, there was a nice shopping mall and walmart about a 15 minute walk from the hotel that we could frequent.
We found a weird feeling in the city. It just did not have a good vibe. It seemed that the people were a little less friendly and the pollution was bad. Our guide was excellent though. She arranged great optional tours and one day spent the whole day with us. We heard from some other parents that their guides weren't so great (different agencies from us).
We were surprised at some of the information provided to us on our child. We have found the food that she supposedly liked to be hit or miss. Some of the things the paperwork said she liked we couldn't even get her to touch. Other parents in our group reported that their kids ate anything and everything. We found the opposite and that it was difficult to find even Chinese foods she would eat. Luckily the hotel buffet had a good assortment so we could try different things. We brought a lot of American kids snack foods with us which she rejected almost all of.
We were also surprised that we were not given any info on the state of her teeth which are very bad. From what we hear, this is somewhat common for adopted kids to have but we were just surprised because we didn't know until we got her.
The internet was frustrating to use in province. That was partially because of poor wifi in the room and the Pandapow vpn service we used to access Facebook. Seemed we were always having to mess around with it to get it to connect.
We were surprised at how many times we needed to run to the store to get things for our daughter which we weren't expecting. Luckily we had a walmart close. Mostly diapers, wipes and soft chinese snacks and a few toys.
We had a hard time eating in province. We are both pretty adventurous but with a new kid, we were just leery of going to a restaurant we knew nothing about where no one spoke english. So we ate at McDonalds, KFC, and a pizza place in the mall. Funny thing is that we hadn't eaten Mcdonalds for over a year before coming to China.
If it is possible, ask your guide if they can take you to your childs finding spot. Totally worth it. We did not find a lot of places to souvenir shop in province but there are places in GZ. Being in the airports in province is kind of scary because no one speaks english.
Great Wall
