Once again from a non-Chinese Location

I am so sorry that our February trip is taking us well into April to tell about. I am bad at blogs…

Part 3 In Changsha or mei you ba shi
In Changsha things started to go actually wrong. We were scheduled for a few days in Changsha which we were to leave by bus for the sacred mountains. In the meantime we visited a really cool museum on the history of the province. The day before we were to leave we went to the bus station to buy tickets. The bus station was cold (in fact this winter was one of the worst China has seen in eighty years.) and crowded there were hundreds of people. However since the ceiling was at least twenty feet high the people did not make it warm up. We were waiting in huge lines to but tickets. Finally we were got to the window and luckily they had someone with good enough English that we could get our tickets.

The next day we went to the station to leave town. I stayed with the bags while Meredith went to find out where we should get the bus. The first person Meredith found told her in Chinese 没有 mei you which means don’t have (you can omit subjects in Chinese). She assumed that meant that there were no more tickets so she showed the person her tickets. He responded 没有巴士mei you ba shi (Don’t have the bus). However due to the limits of our Chinese further explanation was impossible. The Chinese person went and found a co-worker who spoke some English who was able to explain that indeed there was no such bus it was canceled because of the terrible weather.

So we extended our stay in Changsha, well beyond any thing we could find worth doing. In addition the winter was hitting chang sha hard. We kept hearing 没有 everywhere we went. McDonalds even ran out of beef!

Eventually however we went to the Changsha airport to get on our flight to Hangzhou the next stop on our journey Hangzhou. The Changsha airport is tiny. We had found one of three restaurants in the whole airport and ate some dumplings. We still had a couple of hours before our flight and it had been announced as delayed so imagine our surprise when two men came up to us, “You are going to Hangzhou? You must get on a plane now!” And so we did. We ended up in Hangzhou about the same time we were originally supposed to leave Changsha.


Part 4 The Hangzhou Hustle.

The final stop on our trip was Hangzhou. It was not planned to be, but that’s how it went. As I said we arrived early. Of course our luggage did not. Normally lost luggage, while sad isn’t that hard to deal with. We however, are in China with only a basic level of Mandarin… We notice that a lot of other people don’t have luggage either (presumably they also got bumped flights) so we follow them when they go to the lost luggage people. When we get to the front of the line they have an English speaker ready. We give them the number of our hotel, our cell phone numbers etc. They say we’ll get the luggage late that night.

So far so good. So we get on a bus to a downtown area where we can catch a cab for cheap to our hotel since a cab from the airport would have cost 120 RMB-ish. When we get there we see plenty of cabs, many unoccupied. But they won’t pick us up. Some show us signs in Chinese but we can’t read it. Eventually someone from the company that runs the bus hails us a cab, took her three tries. This became a pattern for us. We never hailed a cab on our own in Hangzhou. Fortunately our hotel was right next to the train station so there were a lot of buses.

We ate dinner at a little place near the hotel that kept serving us dishes with little to no regard for what we ordered, including some kind of slimy shrimp with an upside down glass of tea in the middle of the plate. We went back to the hotel and went to sleep. We were awoken by a phone call, Meredith shouting, “It wasn’t me!” the second she opened her eyes. It was of course the hotel telling us the luggage had arrived none the worse for wear. We also decided since Meredith’s respiratory infection was getting worse to go back to Shenzen when we left Hangzhou, and booked tickets at an internet café.

The next day we saw the West Lake, the main tourist attraction in Hangzhou. It was gorgeous. We even managed to find the (active) Daoist temple around the lake. It was a good day. We wanted to go to dinner at a restaurant recommended by the guide book. we got our hotel to hire us a cab and went. We gave the cab driver the name in both pinyin and characters. The cab driver took us to a place about the right distance but that was not at all the place we had asked for. We ended up eating at McDonalds.

There was nothing particularly interesting about our trip back to Shenzen. The adventure was over.

Here is an example of Engrish (Chinese people incorrectly generating bad English) from the back of the box of Dr. Who DVDs. I will not that although I do not reproduce it here if a word is too long to fit on one line it breaks mid word to the next line with no punctuation e.g. spa
ce =space! I have however maintained the idiosyncratic (to say the least) punctuation and capitalization.


Doctor Who back:
“Doctor Who” stories around with magic power, vertical space, the shuttle universe. dominate the time aliens “Dr..” Dr. appear on the surface of the earth usually were not the slightest bit, but is saddled with the mission of protecting the planet. The original had been calm and peaceful global crisis, many of the planet from outer space invaders have abundant resources of the earth which are hostile, often waiting for an opportunity to conquer, If not, Dr. critical juncture in the helping hand extended, I believe that mankind has long been an alien prisoners of war. Accompanied by Dr addition to seeing him fitting into public telephone booth time machine, there are a courageous people on Earth wit Rosa. Dr. Rosa cooperation with the excellent traveling in the universe of endless space than going through a period of exciting science fiction journey.