emilyonearth

First semester is over! So lovely not to have to lesson plan, and wake up early, and be at least semi-presentable haha. Have quite a  few plans for the month ahead, all of which you will hear all about in a month of so, when I can provide pictures and stories to accompany :D

Sarah (Canadian teacher at my school with whom I am travelling) and I went down to the train station last week to buy train tickets for our travels. We had it all sorted out, buying overnight sleeper tickets to save on accommodation and not wasting the daytime on travel. We got to the station and quickly scribbled down our itinerary in Chinese as we realised the staff didn’t speak any English and it was easier to write it down than struggle with pronunciation through a glass window haha. When we got to the front of the line, the cashier indeed looked quite worried to be faced with these two westerners, but gave a big smile when we slipped the piece of paper through the window. She then informed us that all the trains were totally booked out.. Right… This wasn’t quite going according to plan. We ended up going back to school and looking up flights, most of which were similarly priced to the trains, except for Beijing -> Xi’an, which I guess is a pretty touristy route, and cost us about three times the about the train would have done :( We also needed to book more accommodation, and skip a city we had previously planned on seeing as it wasn’t worth flying to. But oh well! It’s all sorted and booked now, so hopefully will go smoothly!

I had a busy weekend this week! I went back into school late on Friday to pick up my salary (they called me at 9pm to come pick it up…. China…) and the admin man, Jimmy, gave me a massive bag of bananas his mother had grown, and invited me to come to the park with his family the following morning. So although I would have loved to spend it in bed, sleeping in, I was up early to meet them. We went to a neighbouring city, Dongguan, and walked up a hill there called Da Ping Zhan. Park of the walk was through a bamboo “forest”, which was very pretty! Afterwards we had lunch in a nearby restaurant, and headed back to Shenzhen. Had indian for dinner than night, first time since I’ve been in China. Tasty tasty!

Saturday morning I met up with Ariel and we crossed over into Hong Kong. She flew home on Monday morning, so her parents organised accommodation there for her and she invited me to stay over with her. We made our way to the hotel, went and got some lunch, and hopped on the cable car up to see Hong Kong’s Big Buddha. He’s 34m tall, and was the biggest outdoor buddha in the world until a few years ago. Was very cool to see, and I’m glad I’m slowly getting to know Hong Kong little by little. In the morning Ariel headed off to the airport early and I made my way into town. Found a Cotton On! Also had a look through a market I came across, and though it was mostly just tourist crap, it was nice to look around. Also went to the supermarket and stocked up on ñommies from home – Tim Tams, Vegemite (!!), Whittakers (!!), and Gingernuts. Yum! Now I just need to find the self control to not inhale them all. So far I’ve allowed myself one Tim Tam :D

So as I said, you’ll hopefully hear from me again on here in about a month with lots of stories and photos. But for now that’s all my news, I think!