Beautiful China

• Hlance23's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Guilin

Trip Start Jun 10, 2008 Previous
Entry Trip End Ongoing Next
Entry

  Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang, China
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Our first day in China was rough, but things are improving. 
Things started out poorly in Hanoi.  Although are hostel was clean and cheap, the service was lacking and I think they disliked us for some reason.  We woke up Tuesday morning early enough to catch our 7:30 bus to China.  The people at the hostel informed us that it would come at around 7:30 to pick us up, we started worrying when none had shown up by 8:00.  In the meantime we had eaten our "continental" breakfast, complete with a baguette, butter and jam.  They said we would be given an egg too when we checked a couple days before; thus far they had not given us any, although the other guests at the next table were given so much egg they were unable to finish.  I kindly requested an egg, but was turned down by the staff.  One would have preferred sleeping, while the other just didn't like me.  By the time breakfast was over, we finally learned that the 7:30 bus was not coming for us, but we had to go catch it.  Obviously, we had truly missed the bus, but fortunately we were able to hop aboard the 9:00 bus instead.  It was a beautiful drive, especially as we neared the Chinese border.
At the border we went from the chaotic mess, that Vietnam had set up for immigration, to the clean, efficient and friendly Chinese immigration building.  We went through immigration one at a time and I got through first and boarded my shuttle car to wait for Alban and Phil.  My car eventually left without them, but not to worry, the bus was still there waiting for me and them.  Alban came next amd we boarded the bus to wait for Phil.  There we sat for the next twenty minutes doing a crossword, and there was no sign of Phil.  We explained to the bus stewardess that there was one more person and we needed to wait, she nodded patiently.  Suddenly, with no warning, the bus closed its doors and left the parking lot.  Panicking Lance and Alban rushed forward to request to get off the bus and wait for the absent Phil.  It was all to no avail, some kind people translated for us that they could not stop now and we were stuck without our buddy. We made the three hour trip from the border to Nanning safely, and just prayed that Phil made it through the border and would be able to meet us in Nanning on the next bus in a couple of hours. Sure enough, a couple hours later he cam walking into the train station to everyone's relief.
Chinese people do not speak English. In the small town of Nanning (1.3 million) I asked dozens of people where to find an ATM, but no one knew what an ATM is.  Finally, Alban copied the Chinese characters for ATM and our hostel address onto a piece of paper and we showed it to a cab driver.  He understood perfectly where he was supposed to go.  First we stopped at an ATM.  I ran to get money from it, but no matter what I tried it said that my PIN number was wrong.  So I went and looked fopr another one on the same block, asking several people where one could be found; still, none could speak English well enough.  I finally found a security guard, showed him my card and made motions of using an ATM.  This, he understood, and walked me straight to a new ATM with a Visa logo on the outside.  To my frustration, this ATM also wouldn't work for me.  I ran back to the cab, with a very upset driver, and tried to show him what the problem was while Alban ran to see if his card would work.  It wouldn't.  We drove to a new ATM, each of us trying our cards several times before Alban's finally produced some money.  Our driver was finally happy with us and drove us straight to our $5 per night hostel.  He demanded an extra ten yuan for the hassle of running us around, we tried to get out of it, but finally gave up and gave him the money. 
Chinese food in China, thus far has been delicious.  The first place we found made their noodles right in front of us.  They had picture menus on the wall, so we only had to point to what we wanted and they would bring it to us.  Last night, however, was a different story.  We found a restaurant that looked like it may have delicious noodles.  The only menu, though, was in Chinese, with numbers for prices.  We just randomly pointed at the different numbers and waited to see what our food was going to be.  My bowl turned out to be egg and noodles, and it was very delicious, Phil got some sort of chow mein, and Alban ended up with some sort of white meat that wasn't chicken.
We are now in the beautiful city of Guilin, it would definitely be worth your time to look it up on Google images.  The scenery around here is something incredible, I never thought this kind of land existed.  We'll try and explore it in the morning.  In the meantime, we have found ourselves a quaint hostel in town where we will spend a comfortable night.

Why do they make their sidewalks out of smooth marble where it rains? There have been a lot of close-calls...

Print this entry Share Guilin hotels

Previous Entry Next Entry