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Things have gone wrong. I was woken up by the guide shaking me and saying that we were about to leave. Shit....I hadn't even packed.
I decided to have and 2 min shower and headed down, I couldn't have been more than 15mins but the group had already left, double shit. I asked reception if there were any messages, nope nothing. Now I wasn't that stressed, I knew the name of the town I was going to and had taken Chinese trains before so no worries, the only problem was that I didn't know the name of the hotel.
Anyway I had a little bit of time so I headed back up to the room to sort out my crap attempt at packing. After that and a little lye down I headed over to the train station, they had a English speaking ticket booth so I showed them the lonely planet page of the town I was going to and 20 secs later I was the proud owner of the 1st Class ticket to Suzhou leaving in 2 hours. I headed over to KFC (ahhhh western food albeit crap). The train to Suzhou was one of the new high
speed train and within 45 mins I was there. The guide had given us a phone number so after I little confusion (I missed out the coutry code) I got hold of him. He was rather shocked I had made it to Suzhou on my own, most people who travel with him must be retards, it's so easy here. I waited in the queue and when I got to the front I just rang the guide again and he talked to the cab driver, all sorted.
Getting to the hotel the key was waiting for me so I decided to take a nap, for 2 hours. The guide eventually knocked on the door and explained that there was a tourist expo going on tonight and that a number of people were heading down to watch it, I said that I would meet them. Wish I didn't bother, it was a little nippy and the show went on just a little to long, it was basically 20 decorated boats floating down the canal, the funniest thing was that we couldn't get anywhere near it to start off with, a tourist expo but no tourists allowed near it, eventually Jerry managed
to persuade a policeman to let us through to the side of the river by saying that he would get into trouble if he didn't allow a bunch of westerners through.
After the expo it was MacDonalds time, I had a chicken sandwich but shit it was spicy. After food we headed over to a KTV bar, KTV stands for Karoke TV and the Chinese do like it, a lot. Basically it consists of rooms of various sizes, each room has a karoke TV and microphones and an electronic machine to select the songs. You either rent the room for the night or by hour, if you rent it for the night you also get some free drinks. If you want more drinks you go up to a bar and order them, after last night I was not that up for it but it was quite funny. When we first got there we walked past one room which was totally trashed by the last guests, it was so funny there must of been about 1000 bits of popcorn on the floor, they had a permenant group of cleaners to clean up after people.
The bar took ages to
get our drinks, this is where I dicovered a fundamental fact of the chinese, if there is a job that consists of different parts then they employ one person for each part. In the bar, one person took the order, another fetched the drinks, another took the money which was taken by another guy to the cashier who then came over with the change. Well with 1.2 billion you can't blame them but fuck it takes a while.
Back to the karoke, it was fun but no-one was really interested apart from the Chinese guide and his girlfriend (who was actually very good). This is where I discovered that one of the Columbians was an arsehole. It may sound that I didn't like anyone on my trip but most of the others where nice and I was starting to hang around with two aussie girls (Stacey and Blahine).
After a few hours I headed back to the hotel to get some decent sleep. Although apparently the guide stayed behind with his girlfriend for another 2 hours to carry on, just the two of them........
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