Headed to mainland China.

Sorry for the delay in posting. I have been sleeping. :)


Our hotel.
Our room. Don't let these plush looking beds decieve you. There is a piece of plywood just below the surface. :) It wasn't too bad. You get use to it. Our bathroom. We did have a western toilet. More on that later. :)
The shower floor. Looks very cool, but hurts to stand on. We had to wear flip flops. The rocks jutting up is supposed to be theraputic.

N, Me, and Katie in the motorcycle taxi. I really enjoyed riding in these things. Plus it was SUPER cheap. 3 kuai for all of us= 40 cents.
Our view inside the taxi.

Our first meal together. I was really worried about the food, but found several things that I really liked. The fried rice of course, some sweet potato cakes, fried potatoes, green beans, and corn. T's favorite then was the "swan tien pie goo" (this is not how you spell it, but how it sounds phonetically to me). Translation sweet and sour pork. He learned to say it just in case N was not around to order for him. We also drank a lot of schwey bee (again phonetically spelled) AKA Sprite.
After dinner we headed over to the square where I believe the whole town had gathered. They have something going on every night. It is HUGE. There were people line dancing, there were others dancing together, you could feed fish, play basketball, or just hang out. It was fun until we started to draw a crowd. I never felt comfortable with people following us and staring at us.

We were in Hong Kong for two days and then headed into mainland China. It has a completely different feel to it than Hong Kong. We flew into Nanning to meet our friend N. I was so excited to see her! It had been two years since we had seen them. Once we got there we exchanged our Hong Kong money into Kuai and then hopped on a van that took us to the train station. We then had a 1 1/2 to 2 hour ride into PingGuo. We were lucky enough to have seats. They will sell as many tickets as they want to. If they run out of seats then you just stand in the aisle. There was a girl sitting in one of our seats so N made her move so we could all sit together and catch up. This girl was not happy and gave us dirty looks the whole way. The train made one stop and she looked at N and told her it was our stop. N informed her it was not. She wasn't too happy. I don't know why she was so mad. Once we got into PingGuo we flagged down some motorcycle (3 wheel) taxis to take us to our hotel. We got to stay at a brand new hotel. It was not completly finished, but the 8th floor was. So that was where we stayed. Of course everyone knew where the foreigners were staying.