Wuzhen, China

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Today we woke up at around 7:00 in order to be at People's Square by 7:30 to meet up with Tristan's friend, Irene and the tour group to Wuzhen. When we arrived, the area was very chaotic with Chinese people yelling and screaming. It was also hot as hell. Since I have been here, it has been damn hot and I have been feeling sweaty and gross. It's going to be nice going back to tolerable weather in the states, but I do know one thing--I am glad that I'm out of the asshole of America, called Stockton. Tristan introduced me to the term "hard-drives" to describe a specific selection of people in the city. A hard-drive is a person who basically doesn't have any etiquette or sense of surroundings. They are usually the dark skin migrant workers. A hard-drive is someone who pushes extensively on the subway. A hard-drive is someone who stands and blocks the left side of the escalator while everyone else is standing on the right side. A hard-drive tries to scan a one-way ticket on the sensor of the metro exit gate, when he/she is supposed to feed it through the slot. When you are walking on the side walk and are clearly moving to your right to get out of peoples' way, a hard-drive would see you and move to your right and then you'll catch yourself playing a shuffling game with some dumbfuck. The area where we were at, had a lot of hard-drives. It was hard-drive heaven. We rode a bus for 2 hours to Wuzhen. Thank the Lord Jesus, Buddha, Joseph Smith, and Tom Cruise that this bus had air conditioning, because I was sweating my ass off. I used the two hours to go back to sleep. Apparently while I was sleeping, the bus almost drove off a bridge, and the kid behind Tristan threw up in a bucket that was on the aisle. When we arrived, it took some time to get tickets. We toured around Wuzhen and our tour guide was speaking Chinese the whole time. I was able to catch a couple words but I still didn't understand shit. It was like the same feeling after getting out of class or lab in pharmacy school :-P I tried to take a lot of pictures. Tristan, Irene, and I ended up eating at a restaurant by ourselves and it was quite shitty. The food tasted like crap and the lamb barely had any meat on it. We met back at the bus at 2 hoping that we would be going home since the brochure just said Wuzhen tour. We ended up at some leather shopping mall and we had to stay there for and hour and a half. I took a nap at a table and Tristan and Irene were playing games on their iPhones/PSPs. At this point I wanted to go home because it was hot as hell and I was not interested in stuff that was not on the brochure. The bus stopped at some tea market afterwards. When we arrived at the tea market I had an epiphany. NEVER JOIN A CHINESE TOUR GROUP. 1. They will spend more time taking you to random places, 2. Everyone yells at each other which brings a lot of negative energy and tension to the group, 3. You won't get home until later and you will be hungry. These 3 things were the exact same things that happened to us when we went on a Chinese tour group in Harbin, except this time my Columbia shoes did not get stolen. The brochure said that each of us will get a Haibao and guess what?? NO HAIBAO. >:-O!! When we arrived at People's Square I went to Tristan's place to pick up my laundry. I took the subway back to Yanchang Road. It was around 9pm when I got back to my room. I went over to my favorite restaurant around the corner for some curry chicken. A plate of curry chicken and rice is only 6RMB (less than 1 dollar)...what a steal! The restaurant changed a little bit since it is bigger than it was last year---it's still ghetto though. Maruyi called me today and we're planning to go out on Friday so I'm excited about that.

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Photos

Bamboo
Carved my name on the bamboo

Bai Jiu
Chinese White Wine...tastes like shit