Sanya: China's Hawaii

So this last weekend we had our first vacation. So exciting! Fair warning: a lot happened and this post is long, so hang in there.

Saturday (March 8th)

Saturday began with a walk through town for Bond. This entailed every single Bond employee/volunteer wearing matching jackets and parading through the streets of Zhongshan. Technically I think it was for the environment, but really it's a publicity stunt for Bond to show off all of the foreign teachers they have at their schools. We walked for about 1 1/2 hours chanting something in Chinese and stopped several times for photo ops. They gave us each a video of the whole experience.

Photo credit to Mckenna

We ended the walk at the restaurant where we ate lunch. The food was a lot like the food from the New Year's party we went to. But the venue was HUGE! There were several hundred people there. While everyone ate, different groups did performances. Yes, that included us. We did a dance to "We Got the Beat" by the Go-Gos. Lucky us, we went first :) Sadly, we didn't win a prize :( Chrissy was one of four people hosting the event, so she wore a fancy dress, read cheesy lines, and didn't have to dance.

All these, and more, were filled with people.

Our lovely hostesses. Chrissy's on the right.

At the school, I teach the senior class (5-7 year olds) and the entire class did a song and dance that night. They were sooo cute :) They all wore make-up, including the boys. They looked adorable wearing blue eye shadow. I also saw one of the kids that was in the winter camp class Larkin and I taught when we first got here. I didn't think he really remembered/like me, but he came over to see me and Larkin several times during the night.

Once lunch was over, we got all of our luggage from the school where we'd left it and headed for the bus station to leave on vacation. The way things worked out we took a 12 hour sleeper bus to Haiko and then another 4 hour bus to Sanya, our final destination.

None of us really knew what to expect of a sleeper bus. Turns out it's the closest thing to a Knight Bus I'll probably ever see. There are three columns of bunk beds down the entire length of the bus. Each bed is probably 3 feet wide and there's a little shelf at the end to store stuff. The rest of your luggage goes under the bus. Oh, and some people sleep on roll-out mats in the aisles. It wasn't the worst experience of my life. I actually got some good sleep in, despite being in the middle top bunk (nothing to stop me falling). My best sleep was actually after we drove the bus onto the bottom of a ferry to cross the sea (Sanya is an island, btw).

It's things like sleeper buses that remind me that Asians have NO personal space bubble. At one point my neighbor used my leg to boost himself up onto his bed. Poor Larkin and Mckenna ended up with a man sleeping in the aisle between them who couldn't keep his limbs to himself. I love that sleeper buses exist in China because they would never happen in America. Even though there were seat belts on the beds, no one really uses them and I'm sure the whole situation would not hold up to American safety codes.

Sunday (March 9th)

Once we arrived in Haiko around 7am, we took a bus to the normal bus station with the help of a nice Chinese lady and bought tickets to Sanya. This bus left around 8am and the driver seemed super slow. They played three different Chinese movies on this bus. The first one appeared to be from the 80s and was called 'The Happy Ghost.' They didn't get better after that.

We finally made it to Sanya and took another city bus to our hostel. The owner actually ended up riding out on his motor bike to help us get there.

Noor in our awesome hostel room

It was the best hostel in the world! The owners (Chris and Linda) are amazing, it was super clean, cheap, and next to the beach. It's also decorated with pictures of all the people from around the world who've stayed there. Chris has super good English, and we found out eventually that he's originally from Singapore. So 6 girls stayed downstairs and the other 6 were upstairs with two roommates. I ended up upstairs and our two roommates were Jeff (American teaching English in Japan) and a Chinese guy we helped name Jet (recovering from a hip injury). They were both very nice and we enjoyed talking to Jet a lot.

After we got settled in, we headed down to the beach. Not the cleanest beach, but it was so much warmer than Zhongshan! And while the water wasn't warm, it wasn't leg-numbing cold :) Abby and some others started playing Volleyball and ended up with several international friends playing with them.

The beach in Sanya is awesome for people watching. Turns out Sanya is China and Russia's Hawaii, so there are tons of foreigners just hanging out in their beach finest. In fact, most signs and menus come in Chinese and Russian. We even had some Chinese street salesmen try to talk to us in Russian :)

So many pretty pictures of the ocean, but I don't
want this blog to go on forever...

Sanya's also got some awesome food. First, you can buy a frozen fruit slushy thing. You pick the fruit, they blend it up with some water and condensed milk and then freeze it. Heaven! You can also buy a coconut to drink out of. Not my favorite, but I couldn't pass up the picture op :)

Fruit slushies!

That night the hostel told us about a restaurant with good Western food so we tried it out. It had the best Western food any of us have had in China. Usually Western food here still has a Chinese taste to it, but this place could have been a Hard Rock Cafe. They even had Mexican food up to par for Chrissy. I got Fish 'n Chips that came with real ketchup!

We went back to the beach for a little while and when heading back, we heard a live band playing American music. We headed over and some girls started dancing and the next thing we knew we were singing and dancing with some Asian guys who were definitely a little tipsy. We stayed for a few songs, and then took off before anything got really weird.

Monday (March 10th)

We slept for a while in the morning and then found some food. It was rather cloudy this day, though still fairly warm. We spent some time on the beach, and most of the girls got a fish pedicure. You put your feet in a fish tank and the fish suck the dead skin off your feet. It was pretty funny to watch their faces :)

After that we walked around and did a little shopping. I was running low on money so we went and found an ATM. But when I tried to use it, the machine ate my card. No joke. I didn't even get money out. Yet another nice Chinese lady called and talked to the bank for me, but they had already closed for the day. So while the other girls did some more shopping, Chrissy and I found a Starbucks with WiFi where I FaceTimed my parents (4am for them). Needless to say, I did less shopping than intended.

Chrissy and I then tried to find the other girls. After trying a few places, we found them back at the Western restaurant eating dinner. Jeff and Jet were there too and we said hi.

Tuesday (March 11th)

Chrissy called the bank for me in the morning and was told they couldn't do anything for us until 5pm. So Chrissy went to the train station to pick up our returning tickets. Turns out it was a good thing she went early because we thought our train was at 8pm, but the tickets were for 6:30. So we packed up our stuff to check out by noon, but the hostel let us store our stuff there until we had to leave. We went to the beach one last time for ~2 hours and of course I got sunburned. Then we went back to the hostel to wait in the shade and they gave us some free popcorn. Then we took some pictures with the hostel owners and they emailed us all their copies.

Finally a photo of the whole group!

Chrissy and I left the other girls heading for the train while the two of us took a taxi to the bank. The workers were very nice and they seemed willing to get my card back for me, EXCEPT regulations said they couldn't open the machine until 5:00 and I couldn't get my card until 6:00. And our train left at 6:30. I FaceTimed my parents again and we decided to just cancel the card and they'd mail me my new one from the bank. So Chrissy found another taxi (took way longer than it should have!) and got to the train station.

You would assume that a train would be better than the weird sleeper bus, right? It's actually debatable. We got the cheapest seats, a.k.a hard seats. While we weren't sitting on wood benches, the seats were upright for the entire 14 hour ride to Guangzhou. At one point the A/C got turned off and it got ridiculously hot. The Muslim lady took off her head scarf.

The socializing was way better on the train. Half the group made friends with their neighbor who they named Simon. They talked to him using a translator app for several hours. The two girls across from me (one named Race) offered us some of their strange Chinese snack which I tried. It was like jerky, but less dried and very spicy! Abby and Emily sat next to a cute Muslim couple who they talked to a little.

They guy across from me was very curious. After the customary pictures, he looked over Chrissy's shoulder to see her notebook and popped across the row to look at Noor's drawing. Part way through the ride we had to show our tickets again, and at that point he grabbed my ticket laughing and showed it to the other people sitting around us. And then he did a similar thing with Noor's passport. I'm not sure what we found so amusing...

But sleeping on the train was way worse than the bus. I think I only dozed for 2-3 hours off and on. There was no comfortable position in those seats.

Wednesday (March 12th)

We got into Guangzhou around 8:30am, found a bathroom, then took the metro to another train station to take the fast train to Zhongshan. Luckily, that was only a 40 min ride and I slept a good part of that. Then we took two buses back to our apartment. We finally got to our apartments around 3pm. I was in bed by 4 and didn't get back up until 7:40 the next morning to get ready for school.

And to answer your question- yes I do spend time teaching English to cute children. I'm just debating whether to post pictures of them or not. I'll let you know what I decide.