Travelling in China Part 1: read the guidebook carefully, but you can't believe everything you read

so after several weeks of traveling all over china, i'm safely in hong kong, albeit 3 days early, having fully experienced 春运　chun yun, aka "don't ever even think about traveling around china during chinese new year".

we originally wanted to go to tibet, but that got thrown out the window when we found out you have to go with a tour group.

then we wanted to go to thailand, by bus, through myamar/vietnam but that got thrown out the window too when we realized neither of us could speak enough vietnamese or burmese to get us through those countries.

so decided just to go to haerbin for the awesome light festival.

i got a hint of how travelling would be like around chinese new year (think travelling during christmas, thanksgiving, and new years in the states combined~) when i tried to buy tickets to haerbin. they said they would start selling tickets at 9am, but by 9am 2 whole trains were already sold out (how that worked, all i can say is TIC [this is china] (read "guanxi"aka through connections) ) anyway, one of my friends ended up getting tickets and took awesome pictures here


first picture of the trip taken of sarah, my travel buddy, whose apple rolled on the floor of the bus, but decided she was hungry and used hand sanitizer to clean it :P

anyway, so we took a 48-hour train ride from bj to kunming (top right corner to bottom left corner of the middle kingdom) where i travelled w/ 2 of sarah's polish buddies who were in her oral chinese class. the beds were super cramped and i couldn't fully sit up (i know, even relatively short asian girls like me can't sit up...) so i laid on my back and read for most of the time, resulting in much butt-soreness.


a girl that sarah and i saw during a potty break at the gas station. she was playing with a blonde-hair barbie and was probably super surprised when she saw sarah. i told sarah she prob thought she was a life-sized barbie :)

after arriving in kunming, we got suckered by a security guard who had connections (nobody's safe in china) and got cheated maybe Y100 more (about 13 bucks US) for a bus to dali. but it's okay :) ppl gotta make a living somehow and lots worse could have happened.


translated into "The world's most amazing dinosaur village", this random town we passed had murals of dinosaurs on the face of every building facing the highway we were on

once we got to dali, we couldn't find the hostel. after asking some policemen, we figured out that we were in the wrong dali. if i had read the lonely planet more closely, i would've seen (which i did later while waiting for the bus to the correct place) that there's a new dali and old dali... and we were in the wrong dali. by then it was dark, we were tired, the bus didn't come, so we just took a cab ride to the right dali...

finally arrived in old dali, walked around for about 20 minutes but couldn't find our hostel... found an english sign that said "sandwiches, coffee, and free internet acess" and i ordered my first western meal in a veryyyy long time, oily fries and all:

yah baby, my lovely fried chicken burger.

sarah was the more asian one and decided to get fried rice, which she said still tasted relatively american.

bustin' out the chopsticks~

anyway, so as soon as we got to dali, this old guy started following us, telling us in his broken, heavily-accented english to follow us to his hostel. but we already booked one, and he looked shady so we ignored him. after spending a good hr and 1/2 in the restaurant w/ my greasy fries and sarah's american style rice, we continued our trek, only to find that he had been waiting outside...


Dali 大理 city gate

anyway, following the address in lonelyplanet, we continued our search for this mysterious hostel. as we walked across the cobbled sidewalks of dali lugging our luggage, this guy kept following us. by now it was like 11pm and there were no streetlights and i was praying hard. haha :) after another 20 minutes he had shut up about his hostel but was still following us, even though it was really obvious that we were not staying at any of his hostel recommendations.

but he still followed us... just silently, occasionally inspecting his fingernails.



cows in dali. soooo random...

so finally, sarah and i just picked a random hostel and checked in, partly to get rid of this guy, but mostly because we were beat and wanted to sleep in a bed. our $3 "bed" was actually a cloth set up on top of a mattress, camping-style, 8 to a "room". we went back downstairs to pay, and the guy was still there... just standing INSIDE the hostel.


dali is a quaint little town situated between mountains and lakes

by this time, i was like... well we're already in a hostel. maybe he just has nothing else to do but to follow random foreign looking girls. the owners of the hostel were trying to convince him to leave but he just kept standing there. thinking that the best thing to do was to ignore him, i started surfing the web and doing my own thing. i mean the worst that could happen was that he would be waiting in the morning for us... and hopefully he won't freeze to death. sarah and i guilt-tripped and probably freaked vince out when we told him about the guy :P (sorry)

anyway, the next morning, he was gone.


sarah and i tandem-biked the surrounding fields which was really fun because we got really lost and kept biking in and out of these really cute villages and every time we passed a whole bunch of guys who though they were really cool, they would scream out, "HELOOOOOO" haha which i think was the only phrase in english they knew. it was great, we got hello-ed at a lot. and we got fire-crackered at　too~ 哈哈

sarah joked that she should just ni hao them every time they hello-ed her. they would probably freak out that a waiguoren (foreigner) knew how to speak their language.

but couldn't find any of the restaurants listed in lonelyplanet. strike2.

anyway, tandem biking is awesome and it was fun just biking around the country-side, enjoying the 6th largest freshwater lake in china and the wonderful clean air.

we hired horses to go up the mountain to find the cable cars that the lonelyplanet specifically stated were supposed to be amazing. cept they don't exist anymore. strike3. from then on, we sorta just didn't use the guidebook.

anyway, after a day of hitting up mountains and lakes and enjoying the fresh air, we moved on to lijiang, a town similar to dali. we left that night and while on the bus, God surprised me with a breath-taking view of the stars. oh mannnn it was so mind-blowing, but there was no way the camera could capture it. so yah, you'll have to take my word for it. the stars in yunnan during the winter are amazing.

of course, lonelyplanet didn't say anything about that :)

best time to blog is....

the night before your hardest final.

yes, my procrastinating habits have not been left in the u.s., they have faithfully followed me halfway across the world... drat.

plus, i slept 16 hours last night, but that's because i'm sick and trying to get better. but anyway, i thought i should blog about thoughts on this semester before my upcoming AWESOME trip around china where i'll be hiking mountains and valleys and roughing it with my limited 中文 (chinese) and ultimately, reuniting with the fam "down under" (relative to Beijing anyway) in my HK homeland. i'm leaving on saturday for a 3 day train ride to kunming, yunnan; on which, i will hopefully be STUDYING a lot :) haha yes, i did say study, but we shall see, as my plans never go as i imagine.

iceskating on top of the lake at our school. definitely one of the cooler new experiences :D:D:D this will also be my traveling buddy, sarah from south... dekota. which sad to say, i don't really know where that is. (so californian -_-')

anyway, in 2 days, i will officially have finished a semester of schooling, and all i can say is, i don't know how berkeley kids do it. it is so flippin LONG. additionally, chinese people don't celebrate thanksgiving or christmas, so i had a total of... 3 days of break in these 18 weeks of school. UGH. way too long. i miss america.

things i miss about america right now:
-the air. ohh i miss the clean fresh air of california, with the blue skies (which surprisingly, frequently show their face here, just with a layer of ucky brown stuff)
-running outside. only reason i can't here is... see #1. i mean i still remember the 7-10th grade pe where we ran in the freezing cold at 7:30am so it's doable.
-american holidays. chinese people need more holidays -_-' i remember in high school where we had like a week break every 2 months; here, that just doesn't exist :(
-cheese. and milk. and nuts. ooo i miss nuts so much :( they are sooo expensive here, hence i've asked everyone who has gone back to the states to bring back lotsss of cashews and honey roasted peanuts and peanut butter for me :)

me at an indian buffet restaurant :) i miss mi indian friends!!! and indian people in general! there's only one indian here at the university so far who i've seen.

but really, when it comes down to it, I AM LOVING IT HERE. :) the abovementioned is definitely the minority of my experience here and it's weird, but i really can't put it to words why i love it here so much. here as in china, but i mean after this travelling experience around china, i only expect to love it even MORE. cause right now, my view of china is basically beijing. man, i can't even begin to describe all the
awesome things i'm learning here, from the language, to the culture, to seeing all the insane amazing wondrous things that God's doing here, to making new friends and trying new things and getting outside of my bubble. it's awesome and i totally realize why people recommend everyone in college to study abroad. only because it is TRULy awesome; you learn so much about yourself, about the things that you have believed your whole life, etc. etc.

really though, you're supposed to have that experience when you go to college. for whatever reason, probably because 40 people from my high school went to ucla, i didn't. i didnt break out, didn't branch out, didn't try many new things. not that i regret it, the past 2 years i wouldn't trade for any other. but being here in china, the only person here from ucla, something about that. not that i'm really reinventing myself like i had envisioned when i went to ucla, but just finding out more about myself.

what's really funny, is that everything i just wrote, i wrote in chinese for one of my classes :) woohoo.

so thoughts about this semester, besides the fact that God has blessed me BAJILLIONS and shown me more and more who i am and what it means to follow him everyday, he's also shown me what he's doing here in china and it BLOWS my mind... God's so in control it's rediculous :) anyway, my chinese has improved (it better!) but definitely not doing as well as i hoped in the making chinese friends department. i definitely love the ones i have though :) i lovee beida, i love beijing, i love china, i love chinese, i love the chinese people; i might stay longer than i had planned, how much longer, i won't be sure of yet until the end of may.

christmas and new years were definitely weird here, there is no "christmas season" although it's amazing how they publically play carols and other songs about Jesus being King of Kings all over China, whereas 9 years ago no one even knew what christmas was. and of course, i had class on christmas, which i skipped, not really because i wanted to but cause it just so happened that i slept through my alarm, like any other day. good thing my roommate was totally up for throwing a party with me :) woohoo another first :) and then cooking (SUCCESSFULLY!!) rice krispies, punch, smores, hot dogs, sphegetti (haha mel and sofa that reminded me of camping days :) ) . twas fun :)

new years was weird, not being with the fam and all the wvcac ppl at auntie louisa's, instead went to a praise night, quite an interesting way to bring in the new year. there were pastors praying in every language for the world, for china, for beijing, for the church. proud to say that i understood a total of... 2 1/2 languages. sad that i understood more of the mandarin one than the cantonese one... oyy...
my friend, christian, playing his songs at a bar, one of my "new experiences" here in china :) bars are not as scary as i thought they would be :)

as you can probably tell, my english hasn't been doing too well, sometimes i leave words out and don't realize it unless i reread things. oh well :) uhm so yah i guess that's the update. it's flippin cold here, but thanks to my down jacket, i've been surviving pretty well. everyone's starting to go crazy with chinese new year coming up, and i'm excited to see how china will celebrate it. i'm guessing it'll be christmas, new years, and thanksgiving combined together in the states so it'll definitely be worthwhile.

mm lessee... not very homesick, but then again, that usually hits around the second year from my experience :) i do reminisce often, usually when i'm sitting on my bed, away from chinese people and sounds, facebooking and seeing what other people are up to halfway around the world. but i've come to realize that no matter what, even if i was back at la or in san jose, things change and there will never be another 2006 or 2007 or now a 2008. all my memories are just those, memories. when my friend came to visit me in beijing, he said that things aren't the same at la as i remembered, life still goes on. and when i look at lynbrook seniors prepping for their proms and think back to my proms, that was the past. i think about walking over to the girls' apartment and hanging out there all night with no agenda, talking about boys, God, life, whatevers, that was also the past. i think about hanging out with brandon and talking about God's craziness, listening to benson's wise advice about life, talking to mom about everything and nothing, sitting on my daddy's lap and crying over something stupid, reading the san jose mercury, watching saturday morning cartoons, that was the past.

and yet they are all so close, all i have to do is close my eyes.