Going to Guangzhou

So after teaching for one week, we went on vacation for the Chinese New Year. It's a big deal for the Chinese so we had vacation from Jan. 27th through Feb. 7th, along with pretty much the entire country. Actual New Year's day was Jan. 31st, so we decided to spend the 30th- 2nd in Guangzhou (the third largest city in China and only a 45 min. train ride away).

Christina, Noor and I had a fun adventure finding the train station the day before we left and the bus driver laughed at us a little as we got off at one stop and got back on three stops down...

Nice view of the river we found in our
train station wanderings.

The day we left though we didn't have any problems. And on the train ride to Guangzhou we met an Australian man and his Chinese wife. He happened to walk through our train car and stopped to talk to us because that's what you do when you see other foreigners. It's sort of an automatic connection when you see other white people. Turns out his wife is from the area and they just bought an apartment in a different area of Zhongshan. They gave us their phone number and helped us figure out the metro to our hostel.

Finding the hostel after the metro ended up more difficult than we anticipated. We talked to several people on the street who pointed us in the right general direction. At one point, when Christina and Kayryn were asking someone if they spoke English they got directed to a room full of Russians and Ukrainians in a business meeting...

Eventually we found the right building (we were very close the entire time!) and met the person running the hostel. His English name is Cuckoo. No joke. And it kind of fit. It took us 30 minutes, 4 phones, and a Japanese man who spoke some English and Chinese to communicate how much we still owed and complete check-in. Check out thankfully went faster.

For a hostel it was pretty good, except for the shower... That was a little scary.

Only pictures I have from the hostel
are of Chrissy and Emily taking
silly pictures on my phone.

After that we wandered around a little to find somewhere to eat and in the process found "The Mall of the World." It's a mostly underground mall underneath a long park. Several people were excited about the American food options there (Subway, McDonald's, KFC...).