china highlights

Jesse and I spent a couple of days in Shenzhen, China, a place with not much to do. But we still enjoyed our time there. We ate a lot of great (cheap) food. We felt like true travelers as we couldn't communicate with anyone (as an untouristed town, there was very little English). And I learned a valuable lesson: children doing cute little tricks on the street are not doing them for fun. After I paused to admire the talents of a little girl doing this cool thing with a board, cylinder and cooking pot, her little sister chased me down and wrapped her arms around my leg until I gave them some money for the pleasure of watching them.

We spent a lot of time on the train in China. We inadvertantly bought tickets for a night train on the Chinese New Year's Eve, so we missed any celebration there might have been. But we shared a compartment with a little Chinese girl and her parents, and we played together all evening (while the parents sat off to the side eating BBQ chicken feet). On another train, we were in the party car. We were surrounded by a crazy family of 15-20 adults and kids. They were verrrrrry happy to be traveling together and the whole six hours was a mess of laughing, talking, card-playing, noodle-sloshing, musical chairs. We cycled the whole family through dinner time by moving from seat to seat to make room at the little table. We couldn't communicate easily, but we got lots of snacks and made a little small-talk with the couple who originally sat across from us.

The highlight of our time in China was the scenery in the Guilin area, the main "sight" we were stopping to see while crossing overland from Hong Kong to Vietnam. The best part was renting bicycles to ride around the countryside, then taking a bamboo raft back down the river for two hours. It was dusk and we were the only ones on the river for most of the two hours. Here's a picture: