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Our Hostel
Proudly claiming to be the first hostel in Nanning Our hostel in Nanning was everything that China had appeared to be to us so far: modern, clean and mildly friendly. Food had suddenly become an issue as for starters I'm vego, but also reading a menu was impossible unless is was in English (which was rare). The first night I ordered “Fried Vegetables Just” and got a huge plate of wilted spinach, with boiled rice of course. The second night we went to a vegetarian restaurant where I ordered “Seasonal Stir-fry Vegetables”, and again got a plate of wilted spinach. Nick tucked into some crispy skin “chicken” that I was hesitant about and said it was pretty good. Phoebe was rather miffed about not getting the real deal, as Chinese seem to be very enthusiastic about their fake meat.
A specialty here is 'Dog Hotpot', yep, I'm not kidding. Although I'm not sure how much the younger generation have embraced it. While eating 'Fried Vegetables Just' at a hotpot place there was a group of young guys ladling out some meat and vegetable looking stew, but none of them had dug in. They were all drinking and daring each other to go first. Then, to the applause of the
others one of them did. This then led to many more hoots of laughter as they tried to egg others on to eat. One by one, they all ate, except for one that was holding his hands up and shaking his head. I'm not too sure if he eventually succumbed but I would take a guess they were all eating some famous dog hotpot.
Nanning is a funny 'little' border city, largely dismissed as a backwater I think, by the rest of China. However it has six million people and for us coming from Vietnam, was a breath of fresh civilisation. As it's not a popular tourist destination, foreigners are few and far between (our hostel is one of two in Nanning if that's any indication). As a result we got MANY stares from curious people. In fact, we mostly felt like a walking attraction for locals, especially as we had a blonde, blue eyed girl with us. Once walking down the street a little girl walking in the opposite direction saw Phoebe, screamed and ran behind her Mum! Poor Phoebe didn't know what to think and I tried my best to explain, but it left Phoebe feeling oddly
Pearls of Wisdom from Chairman Mao
This was up on our bedroom wall - a good example of Chinese organisation put out.
As I had declared that I was on a wilted spinach strike, we gave up and went to McDonalds. It was here that we ran into some Poms who sat down next to us, I think for lack of anyone else to speak to. They told us they were teaching English in a school about 30 minutes away where they were given room and board plus 150 pounds a month and Sundays off. The guy said they went traveling and ran out of money and had to find a job quick; they had been teaching for three months and still had another two months to go in “the jail”. As they were heading off they asked what else we had planned for the day. I responded with “trying to find a way out of here”. He looked despondent and replied “I envy you”. Oh dear....Nanning for five months probably wouldn't be my idea of fun either. This gives us extra motivation for sticking to a budget!
Booking a train ticket to Guangzhou proved to be quite an exercise. With a change in country came a change in alphabet, Vietnam with the familiar roman alphabet and China with Chinese characters. We quickly became expert in 'decoding' characters with memory jogs such as “this looks like a bamboo stick with leaves”, and “this looks something resting on a table” and so on. After getting our hostel people to write down our next destination, decoding characters on the timetable signs to find the right train, stumbling over a phrase book (our accents are atrocious!) and then just trying our best with English and sign language, the station staff found one person who could understand English enough to be able to know what we wanted and make a booking....three tickets on the Nanning to Guangzhou overnight train, 1st class, two top sleepers and one bottom, tomorrow!
The lack of English speakers really struck us upon arriving in Nanning. We'd been lucky in that the places we'd visited up to this point had a good selection of English speakers of various abilities, however China was a different story all together. Many Chinese just continued to speak Mandarin to us, I guess assuming that we wouldn't be there unless we knew a little of the language. We were so useless we didn't even know how to say “I don't understand”, but somehow we managed to get by ok which goes to show that body language, tones, gestures and a little charades goes a long way.
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christine giles
non-member comment
Alex is hungry
Hi,hope u have learnt mandarin for extra rice.U are seeing another part of China,congrats.My more meagre travel is 2 wks in Lombok.Going now in case i can't travel after case Love Ac