Shenzhen, China

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We landed in Shenzen on April 4th around 10pm with no hotel reservation. We wandered around the airport in search of some english signs and didn't find many and none that said anything about how to get to town. The airport was huge and empty - kinda strange for a City of 10 million people. So we basically just observed everone to try to figure out the process. We tried to talk to some people but they all said "hmm?". Finally we found the Airport shuttle bus and hopped on. Everyone seemed to yell out to the driver where they were going so we blurted out one of the hotels listed in our book. After about 30 min we got to town where we frantically tried to recognise land marks in our book so we could know when to get out. After passing a landmark we decided to try to get out and the driver yelled something at us in chinese so we quicky sat down. A couple minutes later we arrived at the train station, a recognisable landmark, so we had something to work with. Oh and we had a greeting party of a half a dozen hotel salesmen, yelling some broken english "Cheap room.. clean..special price.. you come wit me..very nice" knowing the hotels in our book were a bit of a walk away we decided to go with them. The walk to the hotels was quite amusing because we had 2 salesmen that refused to give the sale away to the other one. The salesmen work off of comission on pretty much any business in town if you wak into the business with them. Anyway we were sick of seeing cheap hotels (at not so cheap prices) so we tried to shake them, we even split up but we had no luck. These guys were good they knew the streets like the back of their hand. So we settled for the nicest hotel on the street and the nicest and most expensive place we stayed at on our whole trip ($50), that's like a week in Thailand.

Wow China is really a different world. This is like starting our trip all over again. Everthing is different, some things more like home but many things still different and more different then other asian countries. One of the more difficult things is everthing is in chinese (mandarin), including the computers so basically we just have to randomly click on buttons that pop up on the screen until the window goes away. We have been practicing our Chinese every day as well as our Chinese character recognition and have had some success but it's very difficult. The first day in China we planned to go to the next town but we quickly found out that very few things are in english and few locals speak english and many of the people that speak english and try to help you out are out to stuff their back pockets with your greenbacks. So after hours of trying to figure out how to get out of town for a reasonable price we decided to go to a fancy hotel that caters to westerners. This was a life saver, it was actualy the same price to fly an hour and a half as to take a bus for 11 hours, that was a no-brainer!

We spent most of our time in Shenzhen just walking around getting a feel for the place, the people, the shops, etc. One strange thing is that parts of the city are really not designed for pedestrians, despite there being millions of them, and people just walk down the busy streets over, under, and around the barriers to prevent them from doing so, because it's much easier than going way out of the way to find a crosswalk. And even then, the drivers are crazy so it doesn't guarantee you'll make it across a crosswalk anyway.

We also saw lots of restaurants with aqariums or buckets of fish out so you can see and be enticed in. We did try one of these places and got some delicious food which we enjoyed with a cheap bottle of chinese wine. At the end of dinner when we went to pay, the bill came to something like 105 Yuan and we handed them the notes. But the lady kept handing back the 5 note and saying something that we couldn't understand. We tried to give it back and she refused it but kept asking for something else, pretty soon the whole group up at the counter was laughing and we had no clue why. Eventually they gave up and let us go and we inspected our money to see if something was wrong with it. This was our first currency lesson. The nice thing about the currency is that the numbers are big and easy to see when you are fishing around for money...the bad part is that several notes of the same value are different colors and sizes based on when they were printed. And what we discovered is that there are smaller denominations that make up the Yuan which are a little smaller in size when they are paper notes (but sometimes they are coins, also of varying sizes) but otherwise look very similar to the Yuan. Maybe you see where I'm going but basically it would be the equivalent of handing someone 50 cents instead of $5, hence the laughter.

So our second day we tried a chinese buffet breakfast and confirmed we liked western style breakfasts. After that we caught the shuttle to the airport and flew with China Southern Airlines to Guilin.

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