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Published: October 10th 2010
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We got up super early.. 6 flippin' a.m. Yuck. I got ready, and we actually got a taxi real quick. The driver was for real pumped to have foreigners in his taxi. He was talking to Wendy asking all kinds of questions and stuff. It was funny.. but not as funny as it could have been since it was so early.. you know me, I don't like mornings much.
We got to the bus station about 7:20 and found our bus. Well, Wendy found it.. you know us English speakers didn't do it. I feel like that's an awful sentence, but I'm leaving it there anyway. We got on about 7:30, probably, and, no kidding, the bus actually left at 8 when it was supposed to. I almost couldn't believe it. Maybe 30 minutes down the road we stopped for a rest. Seriously? I slept some on the bus. It was a little cold, so Wendy covered me up with her jacket while I was sleeping. It was pretty presh.
We were nearly there and stopped for lunch. Again, seriously? It was totally a Chinese buffet! I laughed a little because as I said it, I thought how it
2 Splendid Finds
Yeah, Dairy Queen and Mountain Dew. was nothing like a buffet in America. I ate some cauliflower, noodles, cucumber, lotus and bread. I tried some green beans and immediately regretted it. They were pretty nasty. P and I went and got some water and chocolate. We got back on the bus and made it to Xi'an by 1:00.
We got a taxi that cost 50 yuan to the hostel J booked. We were a little shocked that we had to spend so much for a taxi.. but we did it. Once we got to the hostel.. that was the fun part. Ha. So dummy me didn't even think about the fact that I needed my passport to get into the hostel. The school or police station (I'm not sure which) still has mine. The hostel people basically said that I had to have my passport to stay there. Yikes. So J called Robert in Foreign Affairs. Guess who didn't answer the phone? Guess who wasn't surprised... So he called Clytze (yeah, that's her English name), the new foreign affairs assistant. She didn't have her phone with her. She was in Wuhan. Her dad answered. Nice. So we decided to just go out and do stuff
while we were waiting for some kind of response from the school. Told ya it was fun.
We walked to a big mall down the street. I don't know what it is, but when there are escalators in a building in China, J & P want to ride them all the way up and down. I don't get it.. so that's pretty much what we did. We looked around on one floor. It was a shoes floor because I was thinking I might want to get some different shoes considering I already had blisters on my feet. It was all pretty expensive, but they did actually have legit Vans, New Balance, Nike, Adidas, Converse, etc. I didn't get anything. We also found a supermarket on the bottom floor that had Mountain Dew. Whoa. It was a little different, but it was pretty stinkin good.
After the mall we hit up Dairy Queen. Yeah, that's right.. we went all out. I got a regular tiramisu blizzard. Yum. It took a really long time for us to get our blizzards.. they served every person after us before they gave us ours. It was kind of ridiculous, but I'm pretty sure
Hostel
I loved this so much. it was worth the wait.
We went back to the hostel. No one said anything to me, so I just walked in and went to the room Wendy and I were sharing. I grabbed my camera and discovered our light didn't work. I tried screwing it in more because it was acting like it could work.. it flickered some. Wendy went and told someone though because it didn't do anything.
We left and went to the square where they have the fountain shows. It was really cool there. I liked it a lot. There were lots of statues that we got pictures with, and there was lots of fun stuff to buy. The fountain show was so cool. I couldn't see it super well, but I thought it was really fun.
My passport issue still wasn't worked out. Wendy spent a lot of time on the phone with Clytze trying to get it worked out. They sent the information page, but the hostel wanted to see the visa page. No one could get that to them.. so it was a mess.
We went back to the hostel after taking lots of pictures and walking quite a
bit. J talked to them about the passport thing, and I just went upstairs to my room. I needed to chill for a second and take care of some stuff. P came up, and I took some, I think, allergy/sinus medicine that Jessi left. Yeah, I don't know if it is that or not. ha. It didn't kill me, obviously. We went back downstairs without the passport thing being fixed completely, and we went to Subway. Yeah, this Chinese city has lots of American places.
Subway was pretty good. I got a BLT because they had bacon. It was real good. They had less bread selections and less condiment selections, but otherwise it was pretty close to American Subways. I think Wendy enjoyed it. After dinner we went and bought some stuff like shampoo and toothpaste because I forgot to bring them and J & P just decided they were going to buy it there.
We got back to the hostel, and the nightlife was happening. The bar entrance was right below our room. There was lots of singing and loud music. It was at least recognizable music.. like Eminem (there were others, but that's the only one
I remember at the moment). I was asleep pretty quickly, but I woke up in the middle of the night because it was so loud. It was tough to go back to sleep. It finally stopped though and I slept the rest of the night.
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