Episode VI: Return of the Winkler

For the record, adjusting to an 11-hour time difference is quite difficult. :) So here I am, up at 7 AM on a Monday.

I had an interesting time in China. I'm going to save my in-depth observations for my own blog, since they are going to end up being kind of long and self-indulgent. My goal is to officially launch my jerseybound site with its own original design and a series of new posts about my China trip, so you probably won't see these musings just yet. I should probably write them now, though, so that I don't forget. I mean I wrote notes when I was over there, but with time, the actual impressions, feelings, and memories will fade, and I don't want to lose those.

But, regardless of all that, I'll give you a brief synopsis of my trip.

After harrowing experiences in the Beijing airport, which involved me missing my flight due to airport shenanigans, I finally arrived in Yantai, Shandong province, on Sunday evening around midnight. I stayed overnight at my brother's apartment, and the next day he showed me around his town. We walked around a lot, and saw stuff, and ate Chinese food (duh). We also had some drinks at a nice-ish restaurant, in which I was first exposed to the Chinese love for American '80s-'90s easy listening music.

The next day, we left for Shanghai. Our experiences in Shanghai were unfortunately less than stellar; it rained every day we were there, all day, except for the last day we were there. But we still managed to find stuff to do, and met up with a co-worker of Matt's on one of the days. We saw some museums, and walked around a lot.

Our original plan was to visit Hangzhou, a town that is known for its beautiful lake and ancient Buddhist temples and pagodas, as a day trip while we were still staying in Shanghai. We were then going to take an overnight train to Guangzhou, the town that borders Hong Kong, and then proceed on to Hong Kong.

Due to train station shenanigans (I will go into greater detail about this at some point), and the fact that the train actually ended up being something like 37 hours, we ended up not taking the train, and instead taking the travel day to instead stay in Hangzhou. We took the train and arrived in Hangzhou, Zheijiang province, on I think Saturday. The next day, we spent a very nice day walking around the lake, visiting ancient things. I have good pictures of giant 60-foot Buddhas. Awesome.

The next day, we flew into Shenzhen, a city that borders Hong Kong. A great description of this place would be "a shithole." We wasted no time in catching the train to Hong Kong.

Our time spent in Hong Kong was awesome. Highlights included hiking to the top of picturesque Victoria Peak, and our day spent at Lamma Island, a large island near Hong Kong Island, that was very much a sleepy seaside place, with great seafood and plentiful beer. :D Oh, and beaches! It happened to be pretty warm that day, mid to upper 70s. So that worked out. We got to go out to bars in Hong Kong, which we didn't do so much in mainland China (the Chinese don't really go to bars too much, so any bars were full of western businessmen and hookers), so that was fun.

Overall, it was a good trip, though I often craved the familiarity of home. Food was especially harrowing, especially in some of the smaller towns, though actually Hangzhou had some of the best food of our trip (and no doubt the best Chinese food I've ever had).

So that's the Cliff's Notes. Stay tuned for the full version!