These are all from a trip to southern China at the beginning of July- this buliding is in Hong Kong
We flew into Hainan (large island, near Vietnam) and after 4 days took a train to Guangzhou (followed by a speed train to Shenzhen/Hong Kong). Hainan isn't connected to the mainland by a bridge of any sort- so this train was actually disconnected and put on a boat and then reassembled on the other side. (15 hours on a hard sleeper- saved a night in a hotel!)
View of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak
At the beach in Sanya (Hainan)My apologies to the consistant readers of this blog that I have no doubt lost to months of inactivity. Let me make a slew of excuses:
As many of you know, this last spring my laptop was fairly "unhappy". At first, this problem seemed to be resolved by taking the computer to the on-campus computer repair and having the most stereotypically nerdy person I've ever met install a pirated version of Windows XP (thankfully in English) on my computer. After losing EVERYTHING on my computer and learning a valuable lesson about what you should save on your C: Drive (answer: NOTHING. If you just save something automatically in your my documents folder, it will instantly disappear if your computer crashes. Anything you don't want to disappear should go in your DATA drive. Please learn from my mistakes) After attempting to piece together the digital ashes of my life, my computer crashed again 2 to 3 weeks later, exactly when I needed to write reports on all my classes and make spreadsheets of all the grades. Back at the electronics market in Shanghai I found out I needed to replace the hard drive, but due to time restraints left the computer in Shanghai while depending on the kindness of Morten (and his Danish computer "Boris") to slowly complete my paperwork.
In addition to the computer being down (it currently has double the amount of storage, but doesn't have any information on it other than Skype and a pirated version of Microsoft Office Suite... and ~10GB of photos from Yang's computer) the Chinese government also decided to block this blogging website. Then, once classes were done, Yang and I took a trip to southern China to Hainan (tropical island- "Hawaii of China") and Hong Kong/Macau (see above). It was nice to be able to swim in the sea- I'd really hoped to snorkle, but the snorkle we bought wouldn't seal to keep out the water and it was nearly impossible. The only sunblock I could find was "skin whitening sunblock". Still have a strong dislike of seafood in China- not helped by the cute little parrot fish I saw on the menu at the restaurants. Good train ride back to the mainland, Hong Kong was awesome. I went a little crazy at the first convient shop I went in to because they sold English Cosmo magazines and tampons. Many of the buses are double decker and cars drive on the left, seeing as it was a British colony and all. In Hong Kong/Guangzhou they speak Cantonese instead of Mandarin (which I've been learning). They also use traditional Chinese characters when I have been learning simplified. Your average mainland Chinese person can read traditional characters- they just might have trouble writing them. But it was nice to be on even footing with Yang because, like me, he cannot speak Cantonese. He could read, but he ended up having to communicate with people in English :P. There was also a beer festival while we were there (which was probably attended by around 70% white people) but I found the little tequilia bar most enjoyable and showed Yang how to take a tequilia shot of "Crazy Armadillo" tequilia. Nothing too crazy, but it was a great night and we really got to enjoy the view of the city from the harbor. Hong Kong has a lot of topography and reminded me a lot of San Francisco.
I am heading back to China to teach at the university one more term on Monday. To deal with the block, I am going to set up a different blog on another site which I will put a link to on here later this week. Even without switching sites, there are ways to get around the blocks in China- they are just slow and sometimes unreliable. Hopefully switching websites will at least temporarily solve this problem so I can keep this updated more regularly.
