Chinky

08/06/06

"Arrived in China"

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Day 1

I don’t know how I’m going to make it.  I’m supposed to go and walk around China, one of the most packed places in the entire world, carrying my mother’s large case of god knows what, having only 20 min of rest in an airplane bathroom in the past 30 hours... I am hallucinating.  Figments of my imagination appear next to me randomly.  One of them is the crazy Irish guy from Braveheart.  One time he said to me that famous line, "I’ve been speaking to the lord, he says he can get me through this."  Then he tells me that he’s pretty sure I’m fucked.

I step onto the bus that’s going to take us around and there is a beacon of hope.  In the far back of the bus there are 5 seats in a row with no armrests.  I run back there and plop down to power nap.  I fall asleep like I’ve just been ninja killed.  As soon as I come remotely close to the seats my body falls forward and as soon as my head hit anything soft I was out.

I don’t know how long I slept.  I know it was enough to regain control of my motor functions, remove the hallucinations and voices and allows me the ability to filter what I say so it at least makes more sense.  As far as I can tell I’m still not too aware of my surroundings but when I woke up I’m told that we are going for food and eating is a very naturally occurring thing.  It’ll be ok if I run on auto pilot for that.

The restaurant we go to is as close to a Chinese café as you can get.  The whole idea of the place is to sit down, order one or two items, have some tea, and either smoke, read the newspaper or chat with some friends.  Apparently entire mornings can be wasted in doing this.  This is also the first time I get to really meet some of the people in my group.

There are 20 of us in our little traveling tour group.  I’m traveling with my mother, father, and grandmother.  There’s another group of 6 that’s placed at the same table with us.  It’s a pair of grandparents, parents and kids, one boy who’s 7 and a little girl who’s 10.  As far as I can tell I’m the oldest "kid" here.  It’s probably because when you get to my age you don’t really vacation with your parents any more.  I think there are a couple parents that are around my age though...  Anyways I have two weeks to find out more about these people, for now I’ll concentrate on trying to survive today without making a fool out of myself.

After we eat there are two sites to see in Guang Zho.  I’ve been to this city before and I’ve seen the two sites but I decide to go to the first one because...  You know I don’t know why I went to see it.  It’s typhoon season and it’s raining pretty hard.  I don’t have an umbrella and yet I go and look at a bunch of rocks and a fountain.  I guess I’m not completely un-crazied yet.  I get back to the bus mildly soaked.  My dad, with his abundance of patience walked next to me holding up an umbrella for the both of us.  He was able to keep half of me dry since I’m too wide to fit entirely under a single umbrella.

The next stop was a Buddhist temple.  There’s always a Buddhist temple to visit in China.  Well, I’ve been to China before and I’ve gone to numerous temples where I learned that every single one of them looks and smells the same.  I opted instead to just sit on the bus and type of the first part of what you wrote.  Don’t worry I did go back later on and edit out a lot of the incoherent crazy.

Then it was on to the hotel.  Finally.  We had about 2 hours of down time before we went out to eat.  The first thing I did was shower.  I needed one bad.  I then fell asleep despite our tour guide’s prior warnings.  He said that if we went to sleep we would screw up our timing and then won’t go be able to sleep the next morning.  This was important because we had a flight to get to and we had to be on the bus for the airport at 5:20 am.  I didn’t care; I slept for about an hour and a half and I paid for it when I woke up.  Getting out of bed physically hurt, everywhere.  My body apparently liked the idea of sleep and was now punishing me for taking it away from it.  It couldn’t be helped, we were going to eat at a placed that had a world renowned method of cooking a pig.

Before we went to the pig place though we went to a store that sold tea and various tea drinking accessories.  If you didn’t think you needed a lot of accessories for drinking tea you’d be right.  But if we go by that philosophy our kitchens would not have little gadgets like apple corers, ice cream scoops, pizza cutters, and salad tongs.  All those devices can easily be replaced by a good set of knives, forks and spoons.  Just know this, if you are serious about anything there are a lot of little knick knacks you can get for your little obsession and let me tell you, the Chinese are fucking OBSESSED with tea.  The store was bigger than one would ever deem necessary for a store on tea and tea supplies but there it was...  They had samples and I think the caffeine in the tea really helped a lot.  After getting hyped up on some coffee it was pig time.

Well the pig was decent and so was all the other stuff they served with it but do you know what’s even better?  Some fucking rest.  So back to the hotel we went.  I could talk about the food but food’s meant to be eaten and not chatted about.

I hadn’t noticed before since I was so out of my mind but the beds here are really firm.  I’m pretty sure I’ve slept on carpets that gave a little more than these beds.  Oh well, a bed’s a bed and I was in no position to complain or reject anything.  I slept enough, waking occasionally because the stupid tiny shit plane’s armrests had given me a charlie horse and it was pretty painful.