Weekend in Guangzhou

Just to warn you, there are too many pictures in this post ;)

We went to the neighboring city of Guangzhou for a little weekend trip. We’d only been there one other time catching the train to Beijing and to be quite honest it was just as crazy as smelly actually visiting it as it was passing through. All in the experience, I suppose. Guangzhou is just an interesting place. The Asian Games are being help here in a hundredish days so the city is getting ready for those but I still just thought it was weird. First of all, black people. All over. And middle-easterners. There was a point where we rode past a handful of people and none of them were Oriental, weird!! That doesn’t happen in China! Also, I’m not kidding when I say that Guangzhou smells bad. I don’t know why but it was freaking nasty. And it’s just fast-paced and the people look meaner and by the end of 2 days we were all very grateful to live in Zhongshan. It’s a good home and we have everything we need here :)

Similarly to Beijing we got to do battle with the metro to make our way between the various destinations. We’re getting pretty good with a week’s worth of practice in Beijing but it’s still just a big crazy mess of Chinese people and metro stops. We caught a rickshaw back to our hotel to save us the trouble of walking after a long day of subwaying across the city.


The little ricksha man. He had a crush on Amanda.

This is how we felt about our hotel..

Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. I put a shirt over my pillow and slept with no covers. Our bathroom smelt like a septic tank and showering in there was one of my grossest China experiences. And I have had some GROSS experiences, trust me.

The next morning we caught the metro to another district to go to the Safari Park!!!!
It made Guangzhou totally and completely worth it :D I was so excited about everything, I felt like a little kid!







I got to feed a baby tiger!!


SO INSANELY ADORABLE!! I want one!!



I bought some food and fed the monkeys. It was fun to watch em scramble for it.


There was a series of exhibits called Tiger Hill and oh my goodness, dreams were fulfilled here. I love tigers so this was so amazing!

They had so many white tigers here! And reading the story about the couple of tigers here who have 150 family members around the globe, which make up more than half of the white tiger population in the world. Thank you, China, for taking the effort to preserve the white tiger legacy!


I decided on a favorite tiger species! The South China tiger, isn’t that appropriate?

The tiger cubs were so cute! They had so many of them!




Baby tigers! So itty bitty and they don’t even have their stripes yet!


And because one tiger wasn’t enough..


I had to hold the white one too ;)



Hey what’s my class doing at the safari park?? I ran for cover..



Then I got to feed an elephant! He was playful and it was cute.



Koalas are sleepy.


And just when I thought the day couldn’t get any better at this extraordinarily out of this world safari park …

I rode an elephant!!



Booyah!


But wait, they had pandas, too!!


This guy was my favorite!


LOOK AT HIS FACE! Isn’t he adorable?? I can totally see why the panda is so loved here, and why they made such cute cartoons.

Yes, my dreams came true. About twelve of them :)

Dear China,
I realize a lot of the things you do bother me (why do so many people throw up here? and your drivers are AWFUL) but for today I am happy you have less rules and restrictions than America when it comes to animal parks. You made me superiorly blissful :)


Then for some shopping which is always an experience.


Here we are trying on swimming suits over our clothes at an outdoor market. Lovely :)

We tried a couple more shopping places and were unsuccessful at finding what we wanted and felt as hungry, tired and irritable as if it were day 5 of Beijing. I’m starting to get burnt out on normal days so this frustrating travel experience was not exempt. One night was quite enough for me, thank you very much.

Oh Guangzhou. Thanks for the zoo but I will not miss you.

Long Vacation: Day 1

I’ve decided the best way to go about blogging about this colossal vacation is to choose 5 pictures a day and just mention other details. It will be hard to show so little but it’s the only way to keep me sane and get it blogged before I go home when I will have no motivation to do it at all (at least in theory, I could surprise myself). And due to circumstances out of my control I have to learn a new teaching method and teach first grade using it for the next 2 weeks and it might just be the death of me. That’s just me complaining but it’ll be alright. It just means I have other responsibilities and 9 days of vacation are looming over my head (known across the ILP board as the infamous "Long Vacation", hope you don't mind me referring to it as such). I’m also gritting my teeth and using smaller photobucket pictures because it’s faster. Oh the things I have learned to put up with here, you have no idea. Anyway, blabbing, let’s get to it!

We had to teach that morning, so instead of worrying about teaching I kinda lost it and just started being over-enthusiastic about everything and wasted time letting them pose for pictures. I was on the brink of vacation, can you blame me?

I sure love these kids :) Sometimes they give me grief but they’re the best.

Then it was a mad hustle to catch the bus downtown to catch a bus to Guangzhou to the train station! (I ride a lot of buses here..sigh). I can’t even remember what the train station was like, other than a lot of running around like chickens with our heads cut off, hauling our luggage up long flights of stairs and just feeling perplexed and stressed about making the train.

Took a break for a photo in the station but do I look as frazzled here as I felt? I sure think so. Still though, it was my first time on a real passenger train so all stress aside, pictures must be taken!

We got into the train and da dad a da! Behold, the sleeper train! And what a glorious thing it was, 6 bunks in a cabin, this was tons cooler than the Hogwarts Express!

The climb is pretty perilous to the top bunk! We had fun exploring for the first three hours, but with a total of 21 hours on it we got pretty creative.

What did we do, you might ask? A momentary shot at entertainment that was one of the only ones documented:

Trying to perfect the one eye crossed, the other eye not thing. I was getting pretty close before the combination of a moving train and going cross-eyed started making me sick.
We had a Chinese woman on the bottom left bunk who we made friends with but once again the language barrier was a problem. We watched for the noodle cart, met a Chinese rock band, used train squatters (interesting..), watched funny Chinese reality shows and finally turned in for the night. The beds were pretty comfortable, but cool factor of sleeping on a train at all made it a lot better. Before it got dark we got some awesome country scenery shots like this. We knew that once we woke up it’d be tons different. Before Beijing we’d never traveled more than a couple of provinces away. Traveling almost the whole height of China now, we hoped it was ready for us!

Sanya :)

At long last :)

A brief note about parent teacher day that morning: the parents were a big distraction watching their kids, I was exhausted and felt like a mess but the day went okay. I didn't get yelled at and if there were glares I wouldn't know because I was trying so hard to control the children that I couldn't even look at their parents! and the follow-up meeting the next week the moms were super nice, just asking about their kids individually and how well they speak English. They were more worried about things like the kids getting enough water or if their gross sweaty back towels get put out to dry often enough. So I'm off the hook, phew! Even with the injuries that seem to keep happening in my class I left the classroom unscathed Friday afternoon. And ready for Sanya :)

We headed to the bus station shortly after lunch. One thing we say about China is that it doesn't rain here, it "mists"--meaning there are never water drops falling from the sky ever, just a light little misty thing. It's very strange. Well it was misting that afternoon and I told on of the girls in our group, Anna, how weird it was. I should have held my tongue because as we got off the number 10 bus to the bus station it was a downpour. Oh one other thing you should know: in order to not get robbed, we sometimes wear our backpacks on our fronts. Not the most attractive thing ever, in fact it looks downright silly...but hey it keeps your stuff safe! Now picture me at this point, glasses, green UVSC sweatshirt (now vintage, gotta love it!), sweat pants, not able to reach my umbrella, running for shelter to the station. Yes, I couldn't help but laugh at this scene. It only added to the moment that a Chinese woman came up from behind me and started running in time with me, holding her umbrella over my head with a big smile on her face. Thank you, random kind Chinese stranger :)

We got on our bus an hour later and as we settle in I noticed I was the lucky duck sitting behind the toilet. It was alright but became a problem about 5 hours into the trip..I won't go into details about that. Amanda's bed was right next to a speaker blaring music to a very questionable in-bus movie that was playing. I will never understand Asian entertainment. Literally because of the language, yes, but as far as content as well. So weird.

You should understand this about sleeper bus rides-- they are pretty confusing. You sleep in hour chunks, wake up randomly, can't find a comfortable position, it smells bad, random Asian jingles are going off on cell phones, there are stops occasionally at these sketchy little restaurant markets with gross squatters where everyone has to get off the bus, there are these NASTY furry blankets that come with each seat that I make a point of never touching (I WILL get diseases, I'm sure of it) and they smell like stinky feet because you take your shoes off and put them in little bags when you get on the bus. Just to paint a little picture for you :) This bus ride was, I think the most eventful of the 4 I've taken so far. There was the most INSANE car accident I've ever seen. It held us up in traffic for about 40 minutes and when we passes it we were all completely shocked at the scene: three white-hot car frames with flames maybe 7 feet high billowing up from them. Very scary! It was like watching a stunt act at Universal Studios. I was very glad at that point to be in a bus that would win most car accidents. Later we were woken up and told to all get in our beds. A policeman came on the bus and shined a very bright flashlight into each of our faces. I guess everything was okay because we drove on without any difficulties…but right after we started driving a man came opened the door and emerged out of the bathroom..where I guess he had been hiding..so funny! I think I laughed for about 10 minutes. Things are so sketchy here it’s ridiculous. Once again we slept for I don’t know how long and woke up very confused to the driver herding us off the bus. We gathered our stuff and were told to put it on another bus. Apparently we were at the harbor? No one was really sure. So everyone put their big luggage under the bus and...it drove away? Um. Okay. Interesting. At this point we just hoped we'd see it again! We waited in line for the ferry (but we'd just put our luggage on a bus? This is just how it is with China..) and just got on! But the ferry was HUGE and there were large trucks and tons of buses being loaded on so it was pretty safe to assume that ours was among them.


And my name was on the ferry. A nice little bonus at 1 in the morning :)

The hour long ride to island province of Hainan Dao was mostly uneventful. The ferry pulled up to the harbor and we wandered off..good rule of thumb here is to just follow the Chinese people so we that’s what we did in this situation. Tour buses like ours started pulling up and we all anxiously stood in the “rain” waiting for our to show up, admittedly crossing our fingers that we would ever make it to Sanya. Eventually it came! Back on the sleeper bus, driving to the most southern tip of the island to Sanya, I was in and out of sleep for a couple of hours and eventually managed to sleep until 10.

I woke up to a bright sunny day outside and looked out the window to see crowded sidewalks and lots of street vendors. Once again, REALLY confusing! We got off the bus, puffy-eyed, and wandered in circles around the bus station until we found a random man with a van offering us to give us a ride. Heck yes, we told him. We got to our hostel and plopped down our stuff. This room was different than our hostel in Yangshuo- it was a big room with 5 bunk beds, a table in the center and big blue lockers to keep our stuff. I had a bunkmate already sleeping soundly :) We were exhausted but we pushed through it-- the beach was calling!! We’d seen it on the way in and there was no stopping us. We got changed and wandered through a couple alleyways to find it..
,
..and stopped for some lunch first. And this was the scene that met us:




And this is how I felt about it :)

A day basking in the sunlight is best spent with the camera in its case, so just know it was wonderful, but I took a break from mindless paradise to get a couple worth mentioning here.


Little Chinese vendors came by selling us pearls (relentlessly..)


..and mangos :) So yummy! And incredibly messy, it was fun to wash off in the ocean afterwards.

We basked in the sun all day and it was heavenly! The sun was warm, the water was too...ah...I can't even describe my happiness without wishing I was back there, moving on!

We headed back home for showers and realized how sunburnt we were. Painful, but completely worth it :D Stopped for some jiao zi..

..and life couldn’t get much better right then!

We rode an insanely crowded bus downtown to explore an outdoor mall. Lots to see!


A giant Buddha. All the Chinese people were holding his beads so you can guess why I am. When in China!



Waiting for our frozen drinks, this family wanted us to pose for a picture with their kid. It might bring good luck or something. Once again, language barrier..

We were too late to catch a bus back to the hostel so we had to resort to other means of transportation..a motorized taxi!



We squished all six of us girls on the back of one and just laughed the whole time (in between feeling absolutely terrified for our lives) and it was quite fantastic.

The next morning was Easter Sunday! And I doubt I will ever have another Easter quite like it. Not exactly your typical Easter pictures, right??





Once again it’s hard to sum up such a relaxing, wonderful, perfectly lazy day so here are the highlights:


A jellyfish washed up on the shore! I only touched it because of Finding Nemo- I knew the top wasn’t going to hurt me ;)




The ever-persistent fruit vendors. This particular lady would NOT stop heckling us to buy her mangos and coconuts. She took a break in the shade between efforts.




Back at the hostel waiting to go out for the night. Such an interesting experience staying in places like these! Hostels are so cheap it's ridiculous.

Hand pulled noodles later and some last minute shopping at the mall for Chinese beach souvenirs. Top the night off with a beach walk and it was a very unique Easter indeed. Not enough celebration of the Savior or the Resurrection for me but it was an Easter I’m sure I will never forget!

The next day we packed up and sadly left our beach paradise. At this point I was nursing a pretty bad sunburn and was a little displeased with myself at how I’d finally traveled to a place the same latitude as Hawaii and I burned myself. Better luck next time, I guess!

Bus ride for a couple hours to a ferry. It can make you feel a little crazy getting on a bus you know you'll be spending 11 hours on...


Ferries are exciting places! Lots of wet stuff and weird smells. Plus a room dedicated solely to instant noodles...who knew?!


A little break for a Titanic moment :)

The bus ride home was for some reason SO BUMPY. At one point I stood up to tell Erin to come sit and talk on the bottom level, and the bus jolted really bad. I grabbed the side of one of the upper beds to keep myself up but my momentum was going and I sliced my finger on the metal siding. I don’t know how to tell you how bad it was because I wouldn’t look at it..we disinfected it and made a bandaid.

I spent the rest of the ride sleeping really lightly chasing the make-shift bandaid around my bed. What a night!

We arrived home, tired and sunburnt but happy. An orange juice from McDonald’s and a steamed roll from the cafeteria and we were happy. It’s amazing how we can go away for a weekend and I can miss my hard little bed here back in Kaiyin. It feels like home!

Such a wonderful vacation!! Totally different than our trip to Yangshuo but I don't think I could say which one was my favorite. It's incredible how many different experiences China has to offer. I really love it here :)

Next vacation in 2 weeks! Beijing, here I come!