Hellloooooo……
Well my livejournal idea went out of the window…..it is a censored site in china and so I cant use it! Maybe in Vietnam I can…who knows…?
Photobucket is also being a pain to use, so laura has a fuzzy wuzzy site here already and suggested I open this here as I can also load up all my photo’s….and there are plenty of those already!
To bring you all up to date so far, I will just run through the first few days….
Day 1 (Monday)
I landed about 3 hours before Laura landed and I had thought I would have plenty to do in the airport while waiting…but I forgot that all those things are available when you check in to depart, and at arrivals the airport has pretty much done with you so there was very little to do….I bought a starbucks and an English/Chinese translation book and sat down…and had a little nap.
One thing I did learn at the airport is that people are not as polite as I am used to. Just because I was at the front of the queue in the toilets did not mean, apparently, that I would automatically get to use the next free cubicle! Which I was glad of as not all toilets in china are western toilets, they are squatting toilets….and they freak me right out!!!! Trying to hold your trousers with your knees so that they don’t touch the floor and negotiate the logistics of the toilet usage (taking into account gravity!) has not been at all straight forward!!!
When laura did arrive I met her at the airport and we grabbed a taxi to the hostel. This was the first time I had left the airport and bloody hell! It was freezing cold! …and foggy! The drive to the hostel seemed like a dream…very little could be seen from the taxi due to the fog and what could be seen was large neon signs of Chinese symbols floating in the fog!
Arriving at the hostel, the taxi driver ripped us off, and didn’t give us our change, driving off instead! But hey, have had black cab drivers at home rip me off too, so I think that is more a taxi driver trait than a Chinese trait. The hostel was beautiful….we were bumped up from a standard twin to a deluxe triple with en-suite as they were in the process of repairing the hostel after the summer use, and being November, they were not very busy. I use the word hostel here very lightly, it was more a hotel…it was 200 years old and the courtyards were amazing. We had only been in the room 5 minutes when reception came and brought us a complimentary plate of fruit!
We had a little look around and about outside, but really we were very disorientated, so we looked for a bar or coffee shop of some nature to grab a drink. Nothing! We finally settled on a café to stop and grab some noodles and a drink. This was a mistake! They had these strange oil burners to bring to the table with raw ingredient that you cook yourself in boiling oil! We decided this would not be such a good idea and settled on a beer and a coke, which were 8 yuan…(one pound = 15 yuan!)….
