Sorry for the very late blog post. China has bloked my blog website and facebook, I will post this very long blog when we are in hongkong. Anyway china has been another eye opener. Our train was perfectly on time to head to china, well we think its our train, everything you guess, as everyone speaks chinese now. We meet a old australian vietnam vetirian, a very funny guy. There are 4 people to a room in the carriages we were with one asian lady. Then all of a sudden a swarm of chinese come to our room yabbering on to the lady, there is more yabbering going on at the next room.( we are all wondering what is happening) All of a sudden the white australian guy bruce is in our room and she is leaving ours going to the next. Few hours later kelsey goes to the bathroom comes back. Just be before the door more chinese are taking photos of her going back to back as she is taller. They love it! Getting into china was the easiest put your bags through the xray machine without anyone looking.....it was very blazay! They are speaking on the loud speakerm we all look at each other with a question mark, its hard when you dont know what the hell is going on because no one speaks a word of english. We arrived on time.....gee were we stared at or what.we wernt sure if its because we have just woken up or if they thought....... i really dont know. Anyway lets get a taxi......should cost us no more that 12 yuan they were charging us 40 yuan. No way we were going to do that. A huge crowd is around us like we are superstars looking at us looking at kelseys ipad with the map on it. They are speaking to us in chinese. It was very funny, we ended up just standing there for 20mins while they crowed talking chinese to us. No one was going to take us. Next minute a chinese guy that speaks english.....what a magical moment. He askes us if we need help......we just want a taxi. Another 10min go by while he trys to get a taxi for us out of the 15 or so taxis lined up. We eventually got one that would put the meter on and it only cost 9 yuan. He drops us of somewhere.....again we cant read anything so we wonder were the hell has he taken us. Couldnt see our hostel anywhere. Go into a shop point at the address and she takes us accross the road down a bit to the hostel. What a relief. We have a full day because we arrived in the morning. We just chilled out really had to buy tickets at the train station for ghouzou but the train was fully booked so we deciced to stay in nanning longer and go straight to hongkong. Do we get stared at and laughed at or what. We feel like superstars! We must be really famous in nanning and we dont know it. Photos are secretly being taken of us. People praticing there english on us saying hello and laughing when we reply. We walk into a shop and everyone comes out of there holes instantly to have a look at us. When we walk down the street the whole street stares and nearly bump into things. ITS SO STRANGE,! We are like freaks to them or something. We went to a night market and it was full of suprises, dog dog dog and more tasty dog. We got some really tasty dumpling from the market, delicious! It was very hard to order as they dont use there fingers to count they use different actions and to make sure there is no dog in dumpling is verh difficult. We then went to the clothing market, it was massive and again we were superstars. We started to think we should charge a dollar for a photo. The next day we thought we would go find somewhere to eat for breakfast then go to the train station to book our ticket to head to hongkong. off we go following tim as he thinks this is the right way to go it should only take 15min to walk, halfway through i mention that we are going in the wrong direction, but tim think hes still on the right track as i tell him we are definatley not. Trying to find breakfast on the way is impossible as we dont know any chinese and the menus are all in chinese and theres a very good chance you will order dog or something that is not normal to eat. Tim finally agress after 30min we are going the wrong way. We then try to ask people where train station is and start acting the actions and noises of the train. We made fools of our selfs as that didnt work. After many attempts acting like a train, hallelujah we found someone that spoke a tiny bit of english we got them to wtite down train in chinese. It was a happy moment. We ran across the road to find a taxi and showed them our bit of paper that said train and off we went. It was a long way!! Tim took us to the middle of no where. Still no breakfast we just had to eat the burger place was the only place that had pictures and we sorta knew what we would get. It was gross! We manage to book our train. Meet the girl in our room and were going to head to the chinese medicine garden, we relise how the hell are we going to get there, we dont have it in chinese? So again the hunt is on for a english speaking person. We find a bit of luck, a chinese lady and a canadian together, they helped a bit. The canadian is the only white person in nanning other than us. We got the name written down. Then some other chinese young guys came along and asked if we need help. They are very helpful to you if they know a little bit of english. He said it was a long way 7km. Taxis are very cheap. We trusted this chinese guy and he puts us in a taxi and sends us away. We arrived at the right place it was a miracle. The garden was pretty average so we didnt stay long. In the gardens we found like a little village that people lived and found a home kitchen and they cooked us tofu, egg and rice with beer, it was very yummy, was more enjoyable than the garden.We luckily found a taxi easier enough to get back. We arrived at the hostel yo relax before we went out to the night market. This night matket was like the programme bizar foods. Lots and lots of creepy food. Chicken feet skewers. My favourite. Whole dogs. Chickens alive in cages ready to kill. Deep fried starfish. Plenty of animal parts and we are not completley sure what they are. We found a place to eat at. We had duck,chinese broccolli, rice, spring onion pancake which came out as a banana one. To order this was very funny, i had to go round other peoples tables and point out what we wanted. I am quickly learning how to use chop sticks but its very embarrsing trying to learn in front of the pros. We then went to visit the mall a shop for everything. A whole betty boop shop a mickey mouse shop. It was really cool and thats what we are doing the next day shop shop shop and no spending! Then going to the market for dinner.
We are in hong kong now. To get here was a long 2 days. Caught the night train to ghangzou that took 13 hours, new born is my carriage, didnt have the best sleep. Then our plan was to get another train to hong kong a hour later, that was fully booked so we had to wait 8 hours so we explored ghangzou. Very pretty city. 8.30 pm we take the bullet train to hong kong arrive at our hostel at 11.
Today we took the hop on hop off bus. We have fallen in love with this place! I will post photos tomorrow and write some more as i am falling asleep. Love you guys xxx
