Seeing as how I had already experienced Christmas in a Ni-Vanuatu village, I decided to try something new for Christmas 2009. I ended up going on a month tour of China via Sydney with Dan. Other than Vanuatu, I hadn't seen any other country besides the U.S. and I had been in Vanuatu for 20 months. I was very excited to begin our trip.
We spent two nights in Sydney, eating Western food, drinking delicious beer, and seeing the sights. I loved Sydney. It's a gorgeous city (if not pricey) and there's water everywhere. The weather was pleasant as well. The opera house was a bit disappointing, but I had a lot of fun just people watching. It was strange wearing a dress that went up to the mid thigh region, hehe. I had some difficulty not staring at people, but I don't get to see a lot of white people other than the other volunteers now and again, and Australian fashion is so different. Also, Dan was nice enough to see the second Twilight installment, New Moon, at the movie theater. If I wasn't such a fan, I'd say the movie was a bit dull, but I just love all that tension between Jacob and Edward haha...
We spent five nights in Hong Kong. As our journey went on, our enthusiasm and energy for cramming in as many sight-seeing activities in a day waned a bit, but the cold we both caught might have had something to do with that as well. We hit HK hard. We mostly just walked ALLLL over the place. I discovered that's what I like to do the most when sight-seeing. Other than those featuring natural history, I find most museums to be a bit boring. In China the museums featured all of the same things: jade, ceramics, bronze, calligraphy, watercolors, etc. Not to say that it wasn't impressive, it just got a bit repetetive after a while. There was a really neat museum featuring the tomb of an emperor from around 1000 B.C. (don't quote me on the exact date, but it was B.C.)
His body was wrapped in small jade pieces and red silk ribbons. He was buried with live human sacrifices, animals, ceramics, and more. Anyway, HK was cool because it had helpful tourist signs everywhere and we were able to walk around without having to look at a map too much. We stumbled upon a lot of cool market streets with exotic foods and trinkets. We even went to an amusement park and rode a rollercoaster. There was a dolphin show and I cried I was so happy, haha. 
We saw parks, gardens, etc.We found it a bit difficult walking around the city. Pedestrian signals at crosswalks were hard to find and the cars moved quickly. Maybe it was just a lack of practice, but I was terrified. On our way back, we discovered that the city has an extensive pedestrian overpass system that connects the larger buildings. No crossing roads and worrying about speeding cars. I was impressed. Too bad we didn't discover that the first time around. HK also had a nice metro system. The double decker buses were cool too, except for the time we got locked inside of one, hehe.
Next was Guangzhou. Just a short train ride from HK. We had a bit of trouble finding the hostel, but the three nights we stayed there were nice. One of the highlights from Guangzhou was this dim sum place we went to. It was something like 5 stories, each story packed with hungry patrons and delicious food. A good portion of the ground level was an aquarium of fish and such ready for the eating. Amongst several delectable items, I ate frog for the first time. Tastes like chicken, of course. Another day we got ourselves pretty lost wandering through a meandering market, probably the biggest and most exotic market we saw in China. There were fuzzy chickens, for crying out loud.
And these weren't chicks. Guangzhou also had a really good metro system, but two separate train stations with similar names. I think one was Guangzhou Railway Station (East) and the other was the East Guangzhou Railway Station.
Next up was Shanghai. The train ride was about 16 hours and it was very crowded. There were three seating selections in the train: chairs, hard sleepers (which is what we had, basically just two sets of three bunked beds in each compartment), and soft sleepers, which were considerably nicer and had access to a dining car. For that particular journey we had the middle bunks, which had little head room, you couldn't even sit up.
We took a bus from the train station to our hostel. As the bus had an electronic sign and voice to announce every stop we found ours relatively easily. We learned quickly that the bus drivers there are completely insane and that the
bicyclists and mo-ped drivers are pretty ruthless as well. We got a lot of good road-crossing practice in Shanghai. There was loads of construction going on too, which made walking around even more difficult. Luckily, there was Yamazaki...everywhere. Yamazaki is a cafeteria style bakery chain that sells some of the most creative and delicious pastries ever. I've never been a big fan of pastries, but soon we were frequenting these establishments at least once a day. It was hard to resist at $1 a pop. On a side note...many nights were concluded with an episode or three of Arrested Development. If you haven't seen this show, and you have any sense of humor, you MUST watch it. It's only three seasons and it's one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. Please, I beg you...watch it.
One day, on the way to seeing the Bund (a road in Shanghai known for its rich history and interesting architecture) we ran into a group of two Chinese tourists and their guide who wanted to practice their English with us. They were a quirky group and asked us to go see a tea ceremony with them. The guide spoke almost no English while the two women spoke pretty well.
The tea ceremony was wonderful, if not a bit expensive. At one point it occurred to me that they might just be ringers for the tea ceremony, but they were so fun and accommodating I didn't care. At one point the guide was trying to explain a Chinese proverb about love through his cell phone's translator. When he showed it to us it said something to the effect of lobster bits on top of garlic green beans.
After Shanghai we took a short train ride to a city called Hangzhou, supposedly one of the prettiest cities in China. I agree. Although there was no metro system, the buses seemed in order and there was a huge lake in the middle of everything. Gorgeous.
It was a pity it was so cold, because there were lots of boats willing to take us out on the water. I get my fill of boats in Vanuatu anyway I guess. We basically just did a lot of walking around. Towards the end of our stay there I came down with a cold so we took it a bit easy. We had to take a train back to Shanghai to catch a different train to Xi'an, the last city in our tour of China.
The ride to Xi'an was equally crowded and about 18 hours, but we had the bottom bunks, which made all the difference. Xi'an was China's capital back in the day and is at the beginning of the Silk Road. It was an extremely important city, hence the walls. The walls that exist today were built in the late 1300s and don't surround nearly as much of the city as the original walls did.
The city is also surrounded by a moat. Very cool. In fact, Xi'an was freezing. There were even traces of snow here and there. The hostel was really cool. We went on a tour of the Terracotta soldiers, which was awesome. 
I didn't realize that it was going to be an excavation, I thought there would just be lots of clay soldiers all around. We also wanted to see the Emperor's tomb, but we couldn't find enough people to do a tour. There was another emperor's tomb that we could've gone to, but people aren't actually allowed inside as it's said to be too dangerous. It's rumored that there are rivers of mercury underground with the body. We walked around the walls surrounding Xi'an, which I'm told put European castle walls to shame. It looked as though you could put four lanes of traffic on top of each wall, for their width.
We wandered around for a few hours before we found the Muslim Quarter. It wasn't as spectacular as all the other tourists made it seem, but maybe that's because we had already been touring through China for a couple of weeks already. There were a lot of interesting sights and smells, that's for sure.
The ride back to Guangzhou took about 27 hours. In fear of boredom, I bought a cheap gaming console called an "Ear" which really is a p.o.s. but I can play Mario World and PacMan on it so I'm happy :) Fortunately the train was almost empty and we had the entire compartment to ourselves. When we got to Guangzhou we had to take the metro to a different station to take another train into HK. During our last couple of days, we gorged ourselves on Indian and Mexican food, so much so that neither of us could drink the champagne that we had bought to bring in the new year. Very disappointing, but I had no regrets, hehe. We saw the Sherlock Holmes movie along with Avatar. Loved Avatar, Sherlock was pretty good too.
I parted ways with Dan in HK. It was very intimidating traveling internationally by myself, but I made it. I leave tomorrow for Vanuatu and hopefully I can get back to Maewo before too long. I have lots of errands to run, but very little money so I gotta get back to the island where (almost) everything is free! It was a great trip, I'm so glad I did it. Hope everybody had a merry christmas and happy new year.
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