I have put off writing about Wuhan. It is now May of 2020! Wuhan is now so famous, or infamous, as the center of the covid outbreak. No one had ever heard of Wuhan. I am one of the few non-professionals to ever got there! It was all by chance. I play a game called Go and it is big in China. The American Go Association advertised a Go school in Wuhan. By the time I looked closely into it, the school was closed. But, I had already kind of planned my trip to only go inland as far as Wuhan so I stuck with the plan.
The above tells you a little about how I ended up in Wuhan. There is also a story about why I waited so long to write about it. Even while I was still in China, I started writing about my second and third stops: Skywells and September Homestay. In both of those cases I wanted to give my hosts, Ed and Wendy, as much publicity as possible as early as possible. There is another page in this Blog called Wuhan Lee. It talks about a young women who I met my first morning in Wuhan and then she disappeared! So while I had not written extensively about my time in Wuhan, I had touched on it.
My first real hotel in China, you really can’t count the first night I spent in an airport hotel in Singapore, according to my notes was Lanling Fanshe Guest House Floor 1-4, Building 4, No 2 Lanling Road, Shanghai Street , Jiang’an District, Wuhan. I am sure I used the subway from the train station to get as close as I could and then walked. It was hot and this was the first time I had really moved my luggage of rolly, back pack, rain coat with arms stuffed with other clothes like fleece and umbrella. It was HOT.
I had touble finding the hotel. My map app on my phone got me to the right location but I could not identify the correct door to the hotel! Finally I got it.
Hard to imagine I had trouble! I guess I just was not sure what it would look like? The young lady receptionist spoke no English but had the app on her phone that I saw regularly that she spoke into and then it spoke English to me and visa versa. As you will see, the room is a little different. And as usual I did not take pictures before I trashed it in the normal Tom style.
Wuhan was the only city on my trip where I stayed in more than one hotel. To do so was not a last minute decision. I came to Wuhan with one night reservation in Lanling Fanshe Guest House and then 3 nights at the Huihao Hotel. My memory is weak but I think the idea was to be in a hotel that had a subway station right next to it, which Huihao did while Lanling was far away from the nearest station. This idea of choosing hotels based on subway access worked well for me when I was not staying in a smaller English speaking Inn. But I have no idea why I did not adopt it for all 4 nights in Wuhan. As I have said, Wuhan was a bit of an exception in that most of my other stops were only 3 nights except Shanghai.