Yong Jiang Hotel Nanning

... cleaned up, and rather like the initial cities we visited, seemed to have no real soul to it. The highlight for all of us though was a visit to watch Shanghai fc in the Chinese premiership! The standard of football wasn't the best, the 60,000 stadium was 3/4 empty, but it was great to get our football fix! You could also have a beer in the ground which was great, and soon enough the Shanghai 'ultras' (read a group of 20 or so teenagers!) adopted us, so we joined in ...

... set my own travel arrangements, thus, it felt quite weird having everything ready without any heavy effort)<br><br>new country..<br>new adventure...<br>new travel friends...<br><br>We flew directly from Jakarta to Nanning, and arrived there midnight...<br>Checked into the hotel which is located rather outskirts of the city centre...<br>

Today I had to go get a "physical' to get my visa renew one last time until I leave. It was an interesting day. First "Jimmy" met me at the office and is one of the first Chinese that I can understand. He is a very nice boy. We went by taxi which took us about 30 minutes to get there. I don't think it is a hospital, but that is what he called it. I believe it was a government building. To renew visa I had to get a physical. Even Chinese need a physical ...

... Pizza Hut, to be tediously specific, for those of you sitting scratching your precious little heads - and a blue-signed mega-store, which is honestly more like a gigantic grocery store here, by the name of Walmart. The Pizza Huts in China are slightly more up-scale, it seems, and their twisted berry smoothies are so smooth I think I could melt right into them. Gorging ourselves on warm dough and dripping cheese, we dined at Pizza Hut ...

... trying to buy train tickets at the station was bewildering, and in local convenience stores I didn't even know what 90% of the stuff they sold was! The city itself is like a Chinese version of Leicester (bland, non-descript, not famous for anything much), so it's not much of a tourist destination, and we attracted stares wherever we went. All I kept thinking for the first 24 hours was that I've never been anywhere so completely and utterly foreign in all my life!

... even though the Teracotta Warriors weren't as interesting as expected, Chengdu was nice from what I hear (I was only there for a day or two and didn't even see the pandas), the mountains on the border of Tibet were amazing if you can handle the cramped, smokey buses with suicidal drivers, and you have to see Yangshuo and the Li River near Guilin. Two months and I just saw the smallest fraction of the country, but it's time to get moving. Hope you ...

... a bland city with few sights of interest, but we found it had the same fascinating street life common to all Chinese cities. After settling in to the hotel we did a long walk to the Guangxi Provincial Museum, which boasts the world's largest collection of bronze drums, not one of our major interests, but mildly interesting anyway. The nicest part was the rear-garden where we saw examples of houses from the ...

... re not really bad drivers they're just driving according to a different set of guidelines. Notice I said guidelines and not rules. Yesterday we were in a mini van on our way to attend an information session at a local high school when the driver pulled out to pass another vehicle going over a bridge on a double yellow line; the vehicle he was passing was a police car. 'Nuff said. I'm not sure if the lights aren't synchronized properly or if people just ignore them, but you ...

Hostel of horrors Continued from ; Dragon's backbone soup April fool's day The road down is very steep . A panoramic view of stepped terraces through grimy windows. The old bus attacks hairpin bends as brakes squeal. Our shoeless driver must have done it a thousand times as his right arm works the gear stick to engage rapid down shifts. Inside the vehicle, school children and grandmothers are crammed in ...

... painfully driven home to me, for not only is there nothing- ABSOLUTELY NOTHING- in English, but there&#8217;s nothing even in Pinyin, the Chinese system of Romanised transliteration developed during Mao&#8217;s era. Except for street signs, it&#8217;s Chinese characters only, and more than a few of those. Fortunately I brought a borrowed Lonely ...