China Pt. 1

So, yes, I just got back from China where I visited for 10 days during Chinese New Year. Stupid me, I did not think to bring a note book with me, so now I'm going to be recalling everything from my memory, and everyone who knows me well is groaning right about now because my memory is so so so bad. Oops. I didn't have access to facebook while I was there because it is an illegal site there and no one has access. On the bright side, however, I did take pictures so hopefully those will help me with any memory gaps. After very little consideration, I have decided to break up my postings on my experiences in China into categories instead of going in chronological order. The only reason for this is that it will make it easier for me to post relevant pictures. So here in this first posting I will give you the general timeline of events and then in following posts you'll get the meat and potatoes of the story. I left England on January 17 at 9:30pm. My very nice friend Anna actually gave me a ride most of the way to the airport since I had a very heavy duffel bag with me and it would have been inconvenient carrying it on the tube. The flight to Hong Kong was 12 hours long (OK, slight exaggeration. It was 11 hours 35 minutes long) and incredibly boring because it didn't have any of the movies I wanted to watch. I ended up settling for Cowboys and Aliens, which I don't really recommend, though it was better than nothing, and several other movies that I don't even remember now because they made so little impression on me. I got into Hong Kong at about 6pm Wednesday, local time. Xinye had been sweet enough to sneak across the boarder to pick me up from the airport. Don't know if I was the only one who didn't know this, but since England gave Hong Kong back to China, it's become pretty much a new country. Hong Kong has different currency than China, has different color passports, and immigration checks between the boarders of China and Hong Kong. I'm so glad he did because I would have been well and truly lost if I had tried to find the bus to the boarder and then on to Shen Zhen (pronounced Shen Jen) without him. Most people in Hong Kong speak english because of the long occupation by England, but it still would have been difficult for me. It took about an hour and a half to get from the Hong Kong airport to the place we were staying for the night. One of Xinye's cousins lives in Shen Zhen so we stayed at his house since our flight for Gui Yang, where his parents live, wasn't leaving until about 4pm on Thursday. I went to sleep almost right away upon reaching the cousin's house. (Cousin's english name is Ben, by the way) Ben was at an office party and wouldn't be home until late and I had only had a brief nap on the plane so I was really tired. The next morning, Thursday, we got up pretty early and went to a park called Window of the World, or Window to the World, or something like that. It was really cool and I took a lot of pictures. That will probably be my second or third posting with so many pictures you'll cry. We left from the park and went to the Shen Zhen airport and a little more than two hours after take off, I met Xinye's parents for the first time. They were totally sweet and really happy to see their son since he hadn't be home in more than a year. I think his mom started crying. There was a little awkwardness in my greeting to them because of the language barrier and because his mom had had a serious cold and felt that half of her face still wasn't working right. I never saw any evidence of it, but it made her really self conscious. She had a couple acupuncture appointments while I was there in order to fix the problem. A half hour or so later and we were at Xinye's parents' house which was on the twelfth floor of a huge apartment building, which I came to find out was not unusual. We went to sleep fairly quickly as jet lag was rearing its ugly head. I was pleasantly surprised at how much his mom had worried about me and my eating habits. She had a fork ready for me in case chopsticks proved to be beyond my skills, had bought cereal and milk and even some pasta for me along with bread and jelly. The next day we went to a giant hotel to check out its buffet that we were going to eat at later and then went to visit Xinye's grandma on his mom's side. She was a really sweet lady who, for some reason took a liking to me, despite the fact that I fell asleep after half an hour or so of being at her house. No one really spoke any english and I was tired, so it was inevitable. We also went to see one of Xinye's violin teachers in order to catch up some. The next day, Saturday the 21st, is when the real eating began. Most of Xinye's mom's family got together at a restaurant and there I tried dog meat for the first time. Everyone watched me surreptitiously watching me to see how I would react to it and if I'd actually eat it. If they hadn't told me what it was, I would have no idea that it wasn't beef. My pallet is just too numb to be able to tell the difference between tastes. Sunday was my mom's birthday but I couldn't call and I didn't have access to a computer so I was glad that I'd told her before I left that this might be the case and happy birthday. It was also New Years eve. I met more of Xinye's family including a cousin named Joy who speaks amazing english and her dad who spoke broken but understandable english and went to great lengths to communicate with me. We ate a huge dinner again on this day. Xinye and I went and bought some fireworks from from a corner store. We spent the night firing them off with his cousins. It was amazing and also fantastically freezing. On the first day of the new year, the year of the dragon, we had a huge dinner with Xinye's dad's family. That was Monday. I sang karaoke and learned the art of toasting your elders. The second day of the new year, we spent with Xinye's cousins and family. Xinye, his mom, his cousins and I went to the hotel buffet that we had scouted when we had first gotten to Gui Yang. By this time, I was a little disenchanted with buffets because it's how we'd been eating our whole time in China, but it was delicious! That night he and I went to a different park with a festival of lights. Wednesday, was yet another huge dinner with an off-chute of Xinye's dad's family. I learned how to play majong on this day. I had thought that majong was just matching tiles that were put in different shapes because that's the game I'd played on my phone. But oh no. That's the western way of playing. Majong is actually a really like an incredibly complicated version of the card game Rummy. Thursday, Xinye and I visited his mother's mother one more time before we had to leave Gui Yang on our way back to Hong Kong. Our flight left around 7pm and this time we spent the night at one of Xinye's mother's friend's house in Shen Zhen. The plan had been to explore a little bit of Hong Kong on Friday and then go to the airport where we would spend the night because our flight left at 8:30am Saturday. We really didn't want to carry our luggage around with us though and since we couldn't figure out what to do with it all, we eventually let ourselves be talked into renting a hostel room where we could leave our stuff, and then sleep on Friday night instead of the those ultra comfy chairs at the airport. We spend a lot of Friday just getting into Hong Kong, through all the security checks and immigration stuff and then checking into the hostel. Finally though, we got to walk about on the streets around the hostel and we found a huge street market that reminded us a lot of Portabello market in England, or a non-food version of the farmer's market in California. It was chalk full of everything and anything you could possibly want from China including fake designer bags. The only think I didn't find there was the pokemon toys my friend had asked me to find for her. I searched high and low, but the only stuffed animal I found was Pikachu. I was bummed. We got back to the hostel room kinda late that night then woke up at round 5 Saturday morning, caught a bus to the airport at 6, and were in the air at 8:40 Saturday morning. The flight back took closer to 14 hours and I was irritated, thinking that we were taking a different, slower route home and that the regulations that dictated our going out of our way were ridiculous when we could be travelling at a different altitude instead. It was only later that I realized that it took longer because the world was turning the same direction we were flying this time, instead of bringing our destination closer to us, so I chilled out after that. heh. Xinye and I landed in Heathrow London at about 1:40pm, tired and dirty and ready to be home. And that's my very sparse story of China. There will be much more detail coming but for right now, I'm going to start some homework. Wish me luck!!