The Trail to HK

Guilin is the first stop on the path to Hong Kong. I arrived here last night on a twenty four hour overnight train. For some reason (most likely waiting for an opposing train) our train had to wait at the platform for an hour, which was a long, hot, sweaty hour. The ride itself wasn't too bad; I'm slowly learning more about trains the more I ride them. The biggest lesson I learned is to be prepared with enough food for the trip, because it's not a guarantee you'll get enough once on the train. This trip happened to be a little lacking in the food department. Rice and veggies isn't enough to fill up this white boy. I ended up befriending a very nice Chinese girl that spoke a tiny bit of fragmented English. Thankfully her phone had a Chinese to English dictionary on it. Another thing I learned was that Chinese Locomotive Engineers suck at driving trains. Any engineer worth his salt would be able to avoid slack run outs on a fifteen car passenger train, but we got them a lot, and they were violent shocks. Thankfully nobody had any open drinks on the table.

Guilin itself seems pretty nice. Very touristy, though. And to add some salt to that wound, it's the Chinese May Holiday, which means everyone goes traveling for the three days. Most of them seemed to have chosen Guilin. That also means that the expat English teachers are on holidays too, and I happened to party with a few of them last night. No gay bars this time, we kept it strictly heterosexual. Ironically, there are more single women in gay bars. I walked down to the bus station today to buy a ticket out of here (train saga is over, for now) and strolled around the city a little. It's humid as hell here, I've never felt humidity like I have here.

There aren't many difficult aspects of traveling in China. The language barrier can usually be negotiated with a phrasebook and a little patience, the transport is easy, the weather is good, and the hostels are pretty decent. The one thing about traveling in China that is difficult and constantly plagues me is ordering food. Whether it be not knowing what exactly you're going to get when you order, or having to put up with the fact that all Chinese menus are geared towards communal eating, it's difficult. For example, today I go to a restaurant that had menus in English. I order a dish of sweet corn with peanuts, which I'm thinking will come out as a stir fry or something. Nope, it was a big plate of corn with some peanuts on it. That's what I had for lunch. I'm positive I'm going to pass a cob of corn tomorrow morning.