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Published: October 17th 2008
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Day 46 - Thursday 16th October - We were awoken at 2am by the staff on the train to be told we were at our stop. Very tired, but luckily it was only a few minutes walk to our hostel - Lotusland. It was then our turn to wake the staff there, but they were very friendly. For some reason i couldn't sleep so just lay in my bed until about 5am that morning. Got up early though and went for my usual wander on my own to check the place out. There is very little tourism in Nanning, but it's another friendly city. Once everyone was up we went on our usual mission to find some edible food so headed to a Wal-Mart. We met Wilf in the hostel so he joined us. I was waiting for him to withdraw some money at an ATM when a girl came up to us and asked to 'speak english with us'. So we planned to meet for lunch the next day. As i'm so used to speaking to Chinese people i found that whilst chatting to Wilf i was speaking really slowly in broken sentences. Need to stop doing that.
In
the afternoon, we decided to go and visit some nearby caves. It was a 25km journey but that was the closest thing for us to do. Charlie (the guy who runs the hostel) helpfully wrote down instructions for us to give to the bus driver as where we were heading didn't have a bus stop. It was a 15 minute bus ride and then we switched to a coach. The coach driver nearly killed us many times! He had no problems blindly overtaking lorries on a single lane road. Once we arrived we were welcomed by loads of monkeys that attack you when you try and feed them. The cave tour was probably interesting but it was in Chinese so i've no idea what it was about. On the way back we decided to go by rick-shaw. I think thats what they are called. An old lady drove us down a dual carriageway at 15mph. It probably wasn't safe but was great fun. For dinner we went to a small restaurant and as it was on the menu we thought we'd try dog. It was ok but very tough to eat. I don't think i'd eat it again though.
The night was spent playing drinking games on the roof of the hostel. Then, after going on a beer run i sat downside and met Lin Yuan (real spelling unknown) who hardly spoke a word of English. But together we learnt the Months of the year and a few other small phrases. She too is going to Vietnam on Saturday so i invited her along with us.
Day 47 - Woke up feeling terrible but a Mcdonalds soon cleared that. Then went back to the spot we met the Chinese girl and waited. She turned up with a friend a few minutes later. We went for a drink and sat down to chat. Then another friend turned up and although their english wasn't great, we got on well and i think i picked up a bit more Chinese. I now have 3 more Chinese friends.
I got back to the hostel at 3pm and had to go and buy tickets for the bus trip to Vietnam. I went there with Lin Yuan, and it was tricky as we couldn't speak each others language. But we had a phrasebook and without her i would never have been able to
buy the tickets. Then we all went for dinner with one of the owners of the hostel and i re-learnt how to use chopsticks again. We also got to eat whatever we wanted for once as she was able to translate for us. We leave China tomorrow morning and i'll really miss it here.
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Stace
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you've eaten a dog OMG!!!