Traveling?

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People running here and there with luggage. Men sitting and simply staring at me with no intent in their eyes of stopping, smells of entire chickens being eaten on a stick, signs flashing here and there "Guangzhou is our home. Come back soon" even though buses are being loaded. Announcements going out almost every second in both Cantonese and English but the roar from the crowd is too loud for me to make out anything aside from "Ladies and Gentlemen. May Ihave your attention please?" Followed by a lot of mumbling. TV screens the size of a normal house TV announcing boarding times and departures. They seem so tiny in this huge hall that all I can do to know whether I'm supposed to leave is continue standing up and showing my ticket every time a large crowd walks up to my number door. I don't know whether I will get a seat or not, I may have to stand - this is a Chinese bus station. A man walks aroundwith a megaphone and a green board - the only way I know he's not talking about me is I can read the time on the card. There is not another white person within eight rows of seats from me and may not be in the entire hall. Some man with no identification or uniform is directing people to sit down - who knows his purpose. There was a very half-assed attempt to X-ray people's bags coming in the hall. They have a machine to X-ray your bags and you're required to put your bags on it but not to show your ticket and they don't even glance twie at what the X-ray screen is showing - who knows if there is a machine! The man next to me smiled and we talked for a bit before he helped me onto the right bus. Can we make friends? As we were speaking in Chinese the natural English translation is more like "Can we exchange information? as it is almost always followed by an exchange of name and phone number. He ushers me onto the bus and I end up at the back where my bag can sit with me. I ask a man if I'm sitting in the right bus, etc. to which he tells me I'm sitting in the wrong seat. I go up front and am told to sit with my bag in the back - I go back again. There are no real seats or "seat numbers" on these buses so I shouldn't have moved to begin with but this whole process of moving has the whole bus frustrated at the one foreigner. They soon forget and I go back to writing.

The hustle and bustle of the bus station reminded me of the bustle of the seafood market I had discovered earlier. I went around exploring the place which to them is the good old "what the heck is she doing here?" I saw people selling all kinds of seafoods, mostly everyone was wearing boots for although it hadn't rained since the day before the ground was as wet as if it had just rained.

Looking back at the shakiness of my trying to write this entry on the bus I also think of the many different people I've met while traveling. The ever helpful William from Zhaoqing and Derek from England who went to school with him and is now teaching here. The traders who were in Guangzhou for the festival. The British man who had spent time traveling in Africa to go back to work and come travel in Asia and then was going back to work and to South America. The Chinese people traveling home. Paul's friends. And finally the Japanese man who had left Japan for a ten month travel around the world. I realize I could never be like him. No matter how much a travel around the world would be wonderful I would never give myself ten months to do it. The exhaustion it takes to simply travel around for ten days makes me understand I could never do this.

As I look ahead at my last six days I think back to the Taj Mahal. It was one of those things where I went for others and not myself I went for those who might say "you went to India and didn't see the Taj Mahal?' It wasn't really that great looking. People had talked too many great things about it for it to truly be that great. Like a place being described as paradise so much and then one going and realizing that obviously there is no such thing. I think of this because I'm wondering about Hong Kong. I don't really want to go. People have described it as another Shanghai or New York City. Macau sounds much better. I will definitiely spend some time in Macau but Hong Kong is still in question.

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