Ttfn, ta ta for now!

Dear enthralled readers,
I am leaving for Vietnam on Monday, so I will be on assumed hiatus from blogging for until I get back (which will be the second week of February)!!!
I'm very excited about this trip.  I'm going with Thomas and we will be staying with a cousin he's discovered in Ho Chi Min City, then taking a tour way up north to Hanoi and then down to the middle to visit some national parks and beaches!  If it sounds like a dream vacation, that's because it probably is!
So wish me luck, I'll be back with lots of news and many and more photos, I promise!
Miss you all,
Jenn

Guangzhou, the "goat city"

I know I haven't been doing a good enough job of giving the locations I'm in because to me it's obvious so why wouldn't everyone know the geography of China?  So above I've posted a map of where the city is I'm talking about: Guangzhou city in Guangdong ("Canton") province.  You can see Shenzhen a little below it and Hong Kong further below that.

I spent Monday-Wednesday siteseeing around Guangzhou, which is an hour train ride north of us (or an half an hour if you take the brand new bullet train! but my travel comrades didn't trust it yet).  It is in the heart of Guangdong province (which is "Canton" in Cantonese) and at the Pearl River Delta, with a history as long as Greece's.

We had some big trouble with our hostel when we finally arrived in the late afternoon, because despite us having booked on hostelworld they hadn't recorded our booking and gave it away to other guests who wanted to extend their visit.  We were stuck in their lobby trying to call and find other hostels ourselves, because instead of helping us the manager turned her phone off for a mystery hour and a half long meeting.  The internet was slow at best and most of my group wanted to rest, so it took a while for Thomas and I too finally get a hold of a hostel with room for 5 at the last minute and find out how to get there.  Another hour or so later and we finally were able to check in and dump our stuff.  Luckily, the new hostel was much better.

We headed down to the Pearl River and ate some soup noodles (and beer) then took a short night river cruise.  The moon was out and the weather was nice so it was pleasant indeed.  Afterwards we wandered around the area, grabbed some more drinks and headed back to the hostel to play cards on the patio.

Sleeping was a little less than satisfactory, mainly attributed to the rock hard beds which I guess are comfortable to people with no hips to speak of (i.e. not foreign women) and the less-than-quiet dorm mates in our 8 person room.

But morning came as it always does and we grabbed some snacks from the bakery before heading to the famous Five Goat Park.  There is a legend that celestial beings descended on goats and brought the first grain to Guangzhou, and so the goats are famous here.  We walked the park and found a pagoda and a Sun Yat-Sen memorial tower, as well as a plaza with many people playing Chinese hacky-sac.
We headed to a peaceful buddhist temple and enjoyed the incense and quiet for a while, before taking a cab to the Nanyue king Mausoleum.  It is a tomb of a famous Emperor dating back over 2,000 years.  They have the orignal site of the tomb as well as a museum of artifacts and the largest collection of ceramic pillows (don't worry, someone had to state the apparently obvious to me too - yes, ceramic pillows would be dreadfully uncomfortable, they are only used for the dead).  There was even some dust under a case with a plaque claiming it was the 2,000+ year old remains of the emperor's favorite concubine.  15 people were sacrificed and buried in the king's tomb.
Later we ventured to look for an antique market but it proved to be extremely not exciting so we head back.
For dinner we went to a Guangdong-style restaurant and tried to order some of the famous cuisine.  Cantonese food is not my favorite in the scheme of Chinese food -- I'm more partial to northern cuisine -- because it involves a lot of things with a more squishy texture and loves to center around dishes like "running chicken" which is an entire chicken on a plate with a texture as if it had been boiled in goo. You will commonly find either entire animals, or different bits of them, like chicken feet or fish heads. I wasn't even aware fish heads were edible, but there you are. Cantonese people love it, but it's not my thing.  Luckily it also includes a lot of seafood, which I love, and taro/pumpkin/coconut milk stews, which I love.

Everyone went back to SZ after dinner except me and Thomas, who wanted to stay another night and see some more things the next day.  Which, after another unfortunately uncomfortable night, we did.
Following a much more relaxed itinerary, we went back to the Guangzhou Restaurant and ate some famous dim sum.  This was more complicated to begin with because the menu had zero English or pictures.  My Chinese is ok for generic foods, but the more specific the less I know.  There has to be dozens of different words for dumplings, depending on how they're cooked and what's in them.  But after explaining to the waitress that we couldn't read, she helped us pick some and the choices were good.  It was delicious and I had plenty of tea, so felt great.
We walked east for about 45 minutes looking for the famous tower, and finally found it.  We just wandered around for a while, looking at various cool skyscrapers (of which there are many) and happened to run into the Guangzhou Museum, so we browsed around inside.  It was nothing too exciting, but I'm a little snobby about museums after being to Athens :-P.
Exhausted from carrying our backpacks around all day, we decided it was a good time to leave.  I still want to go back to see some sites, like the Whampoa Military Academy (which is a famous place where many important revolutionary and WWII figures went, and is supposedly a museum of the revolution now) and the art museum.

It was a fun short trip and good practice for the upcoming one!

View from the hostel roof

river cruise

Pearl River

Ceramic pillows

Ancient hot pot

Tomb entrance

And thus five celestial beings descended on goats and brought grain and blessings to the people

Is it just me or does the Opera House look like a spaceship?

the famous Canton tower

the museum

Apparently the ancients like to build dioramas too

My favorite theory of dinosaur extinction thus far, straight from the Guangzhou Museum:

"The dinosaur contemporary small mammals belong to rodents' predetor; they can feed on dinosaur eggs. Because of this small animal lack of predetors, their population become larger, and more eventually the dinosaur eggs are ate out."

You heard it here first. The dinosaurs died because this fox creature ate all the eggs. All of them.

Hong Kong New Year 2 videos

For your viewing pleasure: Practice New Years countdown from Kowloon and some dragon dances

Massages

At long last, I've discovered one of the best parts of China -- the massages.  We were feeling pretty worn down a few days ago and so went to a parlor our friend new about.  We had a body massage and it was amazing.  The ladies here mean business, no gentle touching here!  It was a bit painful but definitely the good kind of pain.  And they were so cute too!  The whole time they wanted to chat with us and joke around.  Afterwards we felt so much better.  The best part?  It only cost Y60! (~$10 USD!).   I was so enamored that I talked Thomas in to going back to try a foot massage two days later.  That was amazing too.  It hurt even more, but it was a nice remedy for my sore feet.  And then while that was happening my colleague called and asked if I would go with her for a foot massage the next day!  That's not something I can say no to because I feel like it's important to have a relationship with my colleagues when I'm able, so today I went again.  Oh, darn. :P  This is has been the best week ever.
I hope you're reading this, mom.  You would come to China for the massages alone.

Hong Kong New Year

I know, I know, it's been a while again.  But I hate to break it to you, it will be a while between posts until I'm off holiday in mid-February.  There is just too much going on!
Since Christmas I've been in Hong Kong, all around the city, getting things tailored, practicing for a play we're preforming, hiking mountains, getting massages (more on this later!), and soon I'm going to Guangzhou for a few days, Hong Kong again, and then off to Vietnam for three weeks!  Sounds terrible, doesn't it?

For New Year's, I thought I would have to work but at the last minute the teacher's decided they wanted to take their own classes and review with them, so I was off the hook and free to play.  I went to HK with some friends and it was madness, as predicted.  Luckily the border crossing was really fast -- they have prediced over half a million people trying to cross but we went during nap time so no one was there -- but come sun down the crowds came out.  We got some delicious pizza and then went to Kowloon.  Our game plan was to watch the fireworks from across the water.  However, we were three hours early, the police were closing down the roads and paths for crowd control, and crowds there were.  After about an hour we decided we had had enough of all the people and lack of space, so we went back to Marie's (our friend who lives in HK and is wonderful) apartment and popped the second bottle of champagne.
Through some miscommunications, we thought we'd be able to see the fireworks from her window on the 26th floor but at the last minute, literally, realized we couldn't.  A brilliant idea crossed our minds -- the roof!  So at two minutes til midnight we raced out the door in our socks and without cameras or jackets (but with champagne!) and to the elevator, only to find out the elevator doesn't go up except from the ground floor.  And thus in an heroic feat we found ourselves racing up 8 stories of stairs to burst onto the balcony as the clock struck 12.
Unfortunately the fireworks were not very exciting.
But it was a great time, lots of bubbles, met some new people on the roof, and had a nice view of the city.  One of the better New Years I've had in the last few years, quite enjoyed it.

This doesn't bode well...

Carrie, Marie, Cliff, Rachel, me and Thomas

And this is two hours to midnight...

As a credit to all of us responsible adults, there was even some alcohol left the next day!  Poor Thomas was a little hung over and sleepy, but the rest of us were ok.  We got our usual and amazing breakfast at the Flying Pan and then wandered around the city and smack into a dragon parade.  That was entertaining and apparently made a world record with 2012 dragons.  We got through about 30 and then called it good :P
More wandering around and then grabbed a bus home to crash and sleep very well.

Happy 2012 everyone!  Hope you were able to spend good times with good friends too.