Blogs from Hainan, China, Asia - page 8

Mistä tietää että matkailusta on tullut rutiinihomma? Siitä kun lähtee matkaan eikä muista ottaa varatun hotellin tietoja ylös. Ei osoitetta, ei puhelinnumeroa, ei mitään! Ei sillä etten mä jo osaisi tuota pientä kaupunkia (Shanghai) ulkoa, mutta jos edes se osoite tarttuisi matkaan. Onneksi olin sentäs muistanut katsoa Googlesta sen verran että osasin oikealle metroasemalle. Siellä asemalla sitten muistelin jostakin mielen takaosasta semmoisen kadunnimen kuin Zhaozhou... Jonkunlainen ilmansuuntakin oli muistissa ja päädyin kuin päädyinkin sellaiselle kadulle. Tässä kohtaa tuli kuitenkin epävarmuus ja niinpä soitinkin Heidille että tarkistaisi oikean osoitteen netistä. vastaus saapui nopeasti osoitteen ja puhelinnumeron kera. Osoite oli Chaozhou eikä Zhaozhou.Ehdin jo huokaista ja pysäytin ekan taksin ja sanoin vosikkakuskille että soitas poika mun hotelliini ja kysy missä ne sijaits... read more

Spending 2 hours sitting in a bath with a Russian girl in a bikini, letting people come round and take photos was not the worst way to earn quite a lot of money one Saturday afternoon. I hope the Dracular scar on my collar bone didn't stop them selling any baths.... read more

I have actually been at university all this time, not only going on adventures! This blog will look at what it's like to be a Chinese student in both it's meanings: Firstly, what it is like to study Chinese, and secondly what is it like to be Chinese and study. Both are not particularly photogenic but hopefully interesting for those who aren't studying or being Chinese. Chinese takes about three times as long to learn as European languages, because there is almost nothing about it that is similar. Those funny little characters represent roughly one word (or basic meaning) each, although many words are made of two or three, and there are no spaces separating where one word begins and one ends. In total there are 50,000 characters that can be learned, each one unique, although ... read more

On two seperate weekends a big load of us foreign students attempted to get to a little island off the east coast where there are no people and of course beautiful clear blue water and white sand. The first time the chosen mode of transport was fishing boat, and we soon enough found a friendly fisherman with a huge boat willing to take us over there. We had just about filled the boat up with people and rucksacks when the police came, and after a long argument we still couldn't persuade him to let us go, and had to give up. The second weekend, we had planned to build our own raft out of driftwood and paddle there, but just as expected that didn't work either and we decided that the beach we were trying to ... read more

No, that title doesn't mean mum and dad were delivering comedy in Chinese. Although they were receiving a few laughs whilst out here, such as from our host one night watching Dad trying to eat a crab with chopsticks, or from the tea shop owners who ripped them off in Beijing. In fact the speech was delivered by me in a charity show in the university the same week, which I will describe later, but first things first, I hadn't seen my parents for 7 months and it was wonderful to see them, so lets get onto that. The 'rents were lucky enough to be put up in a five star hotel for the week for around £30 a night by an influential Chinese friend of mine, and I think the rooftop swimming pool went down ... read more