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Wow, I think this may be the most uncharacteristic thing I've ever done. When we were looking at a calendar and planning different trips for different weekends, it sounded like an incredible idea to go to the place in China most similar to our Hawaii, and spend an extended weekend right before finals relaxing/having the best time. And in reality, still an incredible idea.
I just can't get over how well the whole weekend worked out. We planned to leave Wednesday night and miss class on Thursday, and booked a really late flight home Sunday night (as in, I actually got back to my apartment at 3am Monday morning), so that we'd have a full 4 days on the beach. I even turned it into a full 5 day vacation, since I took a mental health day on Wednesday to pack and get ready before we left.
We arrive late Wednesday night and check into our hotel which is the Sheraton Sanya Resort because 1) we decided if we were gonna go to Hainan, we might as well go all out and stay on the beach (in a resort, no less) rather than at a hostel in the city, but actually it was really because 2) the amazingness of blake, our friend who used her "points" to get us the hotel room. Which wasn't just a hotel room, but was a suite (the 5 of us girls shared it, the guys had another room next door) which needs no better description than the fact that there was a large bath right in the middle of the room. And we had a pool/beach/palm trees galore view, which I really really appreciated especially since palm trees are my favorite kind of tree =).
We were so eager to take full advantage of this vacation - which I realized may actually be my one and ONLY opportunity to relax for this whole summer - that we went swimming the first night after we dropped our stuff in our room until we got chased out of the pool by the hotel security staff (who surrounded us with flashlights and the whole works), and definitely overdid it the next day by waking up early, and spending something like 7 or 8 hours on the beach. This turned out to be a huge problem because of the incredible difficulty of finding legitimate sunscreen in China. Thank god I had brought some sunscreen with me from back home, but it was only 15, and the sun in Sanya is STRONG, and even though I kept applying it, I (along with shana and blake and andrew and alex) broke Katie's golden rule of beach vacations, which is don't get burned on the first day. Turns out we all got really, really bad burns, which actually came as a shock to me since I don't recall ever having burned, or certainly not having been burned badly any other time I've been out in the sun. But our burns were so bad that it was painful (or even impossible) to sleep at night, and we had to take advil, and by the third day after I ran on the treadmill and realized my sweating was irritating my burn, I jumped in the pool and noticed that my neck was actually bubbling. I was terrified and ran upstairs and blake told me that I probably had a second degree burn. But not to worry, as my neck is now in the process of peeling...it's super gross.
So after we realized how hot the sun was, and that the 15 sunscreen wasn't gonna do it, we gave in and were willing to pay resort prices to get a stronger sunscreen. But that's when the fact that we were in China again posed a problem. It's hard enough to find sunscreen here, not sure they even have it in Shanghai. But between the 8 of us, we bought at least 3 ridiculously overpriced tiny tubes of 30 sunscreen, and opened the box the next day, only to find that they were actually WHITENING sunscreen. That's because that's the thing in Asia - while we want to get tan, they want to get white (when kelly & shana went to hong kong over may holiday, they took pictures of an ad campaign saying "white or wrong"!) Now that it's getting to be summer weather in Shanghai, I've been surprised on quite a few occasions to notice Chinese people walking around the streets and on my campus holding umbrellas (which they consider to be "parasols") when its completely sunny outside. But it was a whole other story to see this same umbrella-wielding when we were actually ON the beach. I couldn't figure out why they would come to the beach in the first place if they were afraid of the sun! Anyway, back to the whole sunscreen thing - so obviously we werent about to use the whitening, which would pretty much defeat every purpose, so eventually we found a nonwhitening kind. But, I still question its effectiveness...
So, after we overdid it the first day, some of us kind of paid for it the next couple of days, by staying inside or at least under the umbrellas as much as we can. I was still kind of stupid the second day, cause I was outside for a good bit in the heat of the day when kelly and I finally fulfilled my dream of renting bikes to bike around one of the cities we visited. We got a map but kind of made up our own route - when our friends asked where we biked, we liked to say that we biked the island, which it did kinda seem like, but in reality we probably didn't bike more than the resort community. But it was still glorious - we rode past some of the highlights of the area, being mainly palm trees and really lush mountains and a really big Totem Pole, and towards the end we totally gave up on the map, and ended up on a dirt kind of non-existent road, that took us past a strange breed of cow, i think they must have been mud cows cause they were bathing in the mud! Rest of the day was beach and pool and oh! my favorite part! HAMMOCKS! I couldn't believe it but this resort even had a fully equipped hammock area. Just a bunch of hammocks overlooking the beach. I fell asleep in one for over an hour, and when I woke up I was honestly thinking that that may have been one of the greatest hours of my life. This trip really was soo good for me - it was so nice to be with my friends, and yet be on a trip that was so relaxed for once rather than so hectic and exhausting, and i had lots of time to just be at peace and to start to think about it really being the end here, and then how I'm going to have to return home and move into a dorm at D.C. and almost immediately start work and then oh god, be back to my real life.
Night was pure fun - it was one of those moments when even as I was in the moment, I knew that this was one of the best times, which would always make me smile when I remembered it. After eating dinner, me and katie and kelly and shana and blake got lured upstairs to the piano/cocktail lounge, because the 2 Chinese singers were singing songs we knew! And were singing them well! And nothing gets us or brings us closer than when we all just sit around and sing to songs we all know. At first we just sat at a table, but before long we went to go "look at the view" and they started singing a good song and - this is what I absolutely love about us - we all just got really into it, no qualms, none of us were remotely embarassed, and we started dancing with each other and singing along, and we were clearly making a scene because all the other guests around us were pretty much Chinese, and well, they just don't usually do things like that. But the singer LOVED us, and she came over to us mid-song and asked for requests and when she found out the majority of us were from New York, the next song they played was "New York, New York" and haha it felt like home!? or something, but we were just loving it, and got so into the whole night and were jumping around and sweating and singing and dancing and performing and just having a great, great time, it was just pure fun cause in the end it boiled down to just me and kelly and katie and shana and we have this "thing" or this incredibly intense energy between us (which the guys get SOOO embarassed of), and because we were sweating so much, when the singers went on break, we ran downstairs and jumped in the pool in our underwear, and were giggling so hard that we made another scene and were afraid it would turn into another night when we'd be escorted out of the pool...
A few other highlights - the next day I got a chance to fulfill my I guess its now become some sort of a tradition on exotic trips like this, in that I got to add Hainan, China to my list of places I've gone scuba diving in. I persuaded kelly and then blake to come with me, and the whole thing really was another China experience. On the one hand, scuba diving in China is so easy to be able to do, because they don't even come close to requiring you to be certified. Our dive came with a maximum 10 minute long introductory lesson in the pool, which basically consisted of kelly trying to breath through the tank (it was her first time) and deciding that she wasn't sure she could do it, and then a few minutes later we were being rushed into life jackets and into the boat. But on the other hand, the whole thing almost didn't happen at all, because the people running the watersports desk on the beach couldn't speak any english, so first they couldn't figure out what we wanted to do, and then we tried to demand having an english-speaking instructor because to be honest, we just didnt think it would be safe if something happened and we couldn't communicate (cause in an emergency, i dont think id be able to speak in chinese), and our insistence on an english-speaking instructor almost made the whole thing not happen at all. The person at the desk put kelly on the phone with the person at the hotel's concierge, and we went through 3 or 4 parties until they decided they were able to send us someone who could speak some english. She's the one who trained us in the pool, and came with us on the boat, but in the end, we actually went diving with Chinese guides whom we think were Chinese fishermen. I guess it didn't actually matter too much when we were underwater, because finally we got to use a truly universal language - hand signals, since we couldn't actually talk underwater anyway. The spot we scuba-d at was beautiful, and was a coral reserve. Although we'd already been at the beach for 3 days, it was really the first time in kelly's life that she got to see clear water (since the water at the beach got pretty dirty especially as it got to be night, and get this - there was all this garbage floating around in it! Like literal garbage! This is just another great example of China's environmental problem that I've been studying since I've been here...). While the actual dive was really clear, and I was really impressed by the colors, it was also the strangest dive I've ever been on. That's because they told us when we got to the beach that we wouldn't actually be able to swim around - we got wetsuits and booties (?) but not flippers! because they didnt want us to kick the coral. So the scene was actually like this: they split us up, and gave one instructor to kelly and I, and a separate one to blake, and our instructor made kelly and I hold hands, and then the whole time he was like literally holding onto us and maneuvering us around. And half the time I could literally feel him like jumping on my shoulder, trying to push us down so we could get near the coral at the bottom. It was really strange, and really something, but it did remind me of why I like to try to dive in some many different places, and thats cause its surprising how revealing the different dive experiences are about the different countries, and it is always memorable.
The dive for me was one of the highlights of the trip (that is until the boat ride back when we ran out of oil? and we were starting to get really nauseaus until jetskis appeared to take us back). And the hammocks. And the fact that there were all of these Chinese couples in MATCHING outfits - matching hawaiian shirt style tops and shorts. Ale, you would have gotten such a kick out of it! There was even an entire tour group, we're talking like 40 people, which we decided had to be a family reunion, all wearing the same "beach" outfit. I keep being reminded again and again how China is really like nowhere else. My camera sucks right now, but good thing Shana and everyone got pictures.
The ride to the airport was the perfect ending to our trip - Shana and I were alone in a cab where the driver put on a mix cd which had some American songs, and the three of us were all singing along. When Elton John came on, I asked the driver if he understood the lyrics and he said "Ting bu dong" meaning he doesn't understand, and so I used the opportunity to translate the lyrics for him. So rewarding!
Great trip, but so strange to land back in Shanghai knowing we only have one week left. Less now. Such mixed feelings about it. And walking around my neighborhood today, on the one hand its my neighborhood, and I know it and am so comfortable here, in this part of Shanghai particularly. But on the other, as I was walking around, and maybe its cause I have the idea in my head that I am going home in only a few days, I'm still aware of how foreign China is to me, it's still such a different place, and I don't know how long I could really just stay here, and do this, without knowing that I would be going home soon in the back of my head...
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