I’m sure many of you were worried that while I spent my time in China I wouldn’t be able to update the site. Fear not, as of today I have successfully published my first post from out here, as well as uploaded new photos to Facebook. Fun fact: It is the middle of Sunday morning here, and everyone I know back home is just getting read to head out to the bar on Saturday night. Fun fact number two: I left Thursday night for China and arrived Saturday morning. I have no idea where Friday went, and I don’t think I’ll see that particular Friday again.
The pictures on Facebook should more than sufficient as far as story telling about China goes, but to add some context to the pictures I’ll quickly mention what our first day was comprised of.
Got here around 9am Saturday, confused as to how the last time we went to bed was Wednesday night, and having been awake for well over 24 hours. Hotel is sick, we have executive suites for rooms and a bunch of privileges to go along with it which is nice. After getting settled in went out to do a few errands thus beginning our first foray into attempting to do and purchase things with a 100% language barrier in place. I bought a cell phone and SIM card (you don’t buy phones and plans together here) and I can safely say it was one of the most disorientating sales processes of my life trying to figure out plans and everything when we spoke three words of Mandarin and they spoke no words of English. Somehow, a hundred or so dollars later, we have phones and can call the US. After the phone fiasco we wandered down to the food court and were too terrified to try anything new down there, so got McDonalds.. it tastes exactly the same and made me hate my life just as much as when I eat in the States. Awesome!
Our final adventure of the day was going to be finding a bookstore, and a phrase book, since now we now knew that people telling us “oh they all know English it won’t be a problem” was a complete lie. There while attempting again to unsuccessfully explain what we wanted, a nice Chinese English student helped us out. She was in university nearby and spoke fairly decent English. After helping us there, she offered to take us around the city. Her and her friend showed us a number of different things and painfully tried to teach us various words / phrases / places in Chinese. Included in the adventure was going to the Nanjing equivalent of Times Square and eating all kinds of random things like chicken (or as my friends keep telling me, dog) on a stick, this weird fruit stick with sugar glaze all over it, and some dumplings. Taking the subway around the city was even more intuitive than riding the T, even with the language barrier. Not to mention it was about a hundred times nicer, newer, more efficient and less broken.
Anyways that was pretty much the day, after being awake for like 36 hours straight or something, we headed back to our rooms and said we’d take a nap and go out to one of the bars nearby. Instead I passed out watching Discovery channel (the only English channel really) and woke up at like 4am.
Hopefully more to come soon along with stories of increasingly stupid things I’ve done here as I gain comfort with my surroundings and increase alcohol consumption.
zài jiàn !