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Published: February 3rd 2009
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Friday the 23rd- New Year break arrives!! We got out of class at 12 and immediately started packing for our trip. I used the fake North Face backpack I bought for 150 kuai and filled it up with as much as I could fit! Definitely no hair products made the cut! Our train left at around five, and we traveled with seven us. The boys decided they all wanted to be together so somehow they figured it out that Elinor and I were together in one car and the boys were all together in another. It ended up working out anyway. After almost missing our train (due to bathroom and McDonald's breaks), we finally got on.
Now, you should that this was a sleeper train, there were three beds high, so there's no room to sit up in bed, also I have a theory that everything in China is made for people who are 5'10, because my 5'11 body definitely did not fit in these beds. I went to go lay down and Chinese people kept running into my feet. You think it would be uncomfortable for them because I was in the middle bunk and therefore about average-Chinese person
head level, bt they didn't seem to care knocking around my dirty feet when I tried to sleep.
All the bathrooms on this train were squatters except for one at the very very end. Needless to say, I didn't mind walking all the way down several cars to use it, and thank God I had enough sense to bring a roll of tp with me cuz they definitely don't provide such luxuries. We also had a very annoying lady in the beds next to us that fond it necessary to play here music on her cellphone outloud. We went to dinner in the restaurant car but the food wasn't very good and everybody stared at us. Not very pleasant. The whole ride took about 21 hours, and how I survived, I'm not sure.
My favorite part of the sleeper bus ride was looking at all the places we passed by. It's truly incredible to see how some people live. I didn't have my camera with me, so i wasn't able to take pics, and they would be blurry anyway. If you've seen Eurotrip, a lot of the towns look like the one the the people end up in
when they are trying to go to Berlin. Very bleak and depressing with buildings falling down all over the place.
We arrived in Guilin at about 2 in the afternoon, although it was more South than Shanghai, it was not as warm as I expected sadly. right away we were hit up by beggars and people trying to give us rip-off taxi rides. Luckily, we are all overly aware of our belongings so we didn't have any trouble. Our hostel was only a few minutes walk away so we made it to the hostel in just a few minutes. It was pretty nice. Myself, Fito and Elinor got a three-bed with a decent bathroom. Right away all seven of us left to go get food. Walking down one of the touristy looking roads we saw a skinned dog hanging from one of the stands! After dinner/lunch the boys left to back to the hostel and Elinor and I set out to explore the town
We ended up going to Elephant Island, which really sin't an island, it's more of a peninsula that is supposedly in the shape of an elephant. They also had a park with a bunch
of stone elephants so we stopped and had a photo session, which is why we have so many elephant pics (she has more with me in them) We also hiked up to the top of the elephant and took a few more pics, but it started to get dark so we headed back.
Exploring a little bit more of the town, we saw a lot of restaurants with their food outside in cages. We saw the typical chickens, fish, etc. But over there they had rabbits and turtles! We got back to the hostel and changed and went out with the boys. One of the Chinese girls at our hostel took us to a club nearby called MAX. It was definitely a Chinese club, and when we got there a drunk man kissed mine and Elinor's hands and babble in Chinese about how pretty we were then gave us shots of beer, but didn't really trust it so we have them to the boys. We got bored of MAX pretty fasty becase of all the smoke so we headed home and that concluded our night in Guilin!
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