It's bloody freezing!

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Crossing the border to China, the temperature changed dramatically. What's the first thing we did once we got to Nanning? Well Annie dug out the various jackets she had buried at the bottom of her rucksack and i went out and bought a coat. How depressing is this, it's warmer at home than it is where we are right now! And we only have t-shirts. I see a shopping spree on the horizon... We stayed in Nanning only one night, before moving on to Guilin. Both are cities and have a Manchester feel to them, but what makes us love them all the more is the fact that it feels like Christmas, or bonfire night at the very least. We want presents and christmas dinner when we get back!

Yangshou is a small town about an hour outside Guilin. The hostel we're staying at is awesome, more like a home than a hostel. We get home cooked food everynight included in the price and it's delicious. We've wandered round town, getting lost in some of the backstreets bordering the countryside. We also went to see the light show, a night time event that was truely awesome. I was a little worried when they were handing out ponchos that it was going to be wet as well as cold, but i had nothing to fear, and i suspect i didn't know the meaning of the word cold,wrapped up in my several layers. Some of the performers had nothing but a leotard on. And on a lake too. Brrrr. The town is all lit up at night with fairy lights; it really does feel like christmas. But we had to leave and continue on our way, so it was back to Guilin. It's really not the picturesque little town you imagine when you see the pictures. It's a big bustleing city and we managed to get stuck there for longer than we wanted. Our plans changed, because the one we had was complicated and involved lots of back tracking, but we couldn't get a train to Chengsha as soon as we'd hoped, so we had to stay put. It was Ok, we just had some lazy days in the city. We found a cafe that served the most delicious hot chocolate, Yum. The food was good too.

On our last day in Guilin, we decided to actually do something other than wander around spending money in shops. We went to the Princes city and Solitary Beauty peak. It was a school with a big hill in the middle. It was really peaceful; a little haven in the middle of the city. It was here we met Darren, an english student who spent the next few hours practising on us, which was great. He became our unofficial tourguide. For our last meal in Guilin, we treated ourselves to a Pizza Hut. You know you've been 'slummin' it' when you get all excited over a western toilet. Although the toilets on the whole in there were pretty snazzy.

Arriving in Changsha, we got off the train at 6am. We found our hostel relativly easily and luckily no one had our room the night before so we could get some kip. The room was freezing! It had a big duvet that you could snuggle into but the room itself has no heating and if you move a bit you get cold again. When we got up, we had to go and book our bus tickets for the next day to Nanchang. It was supposed to be easy. A bus to the train station and then change for a bus to the bus station. Oh. My. God. What a curfuffle! We got the bus to the train station, but we got it at the wrong side of the road so it went a really long way round, before stopping in the middle of nowhere. The bus driver disappeared for lunch and we had to swap buses. Then we got off somewhere that looked like the train station but was infact a convention centre of some sort. When we escaped from all the people on rollaskates, we got back on the bus. When we finally got to the train station, we got on the bus we were told to at our hostel. Arriving at the station, our search for a train to Nanchang lead to us being told we were at the wrong bus station. Eventually after 4 hours on various buses we made it to the South bus station. I kid you not, 4 hours. And no one spoke english, so we wrote out a little sign of where we wanted to go and when. We think it worked. We got tickets to somewhere at least. We'll find out tomorrow where we are. Because the sign worked so well, we decided to run with it. We draw a little picture of a train and went round all the buses until someone nodded and got on. By the time we got back to the train station, we'd missed dinner at our hostel and had been on one bus or another for 5hours. Well, you can't say we didnt contribute to the chinese public transport service.

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Photos

Performer
Doesnt she look cold! Pretty though

I want one!
I want anm outfit that lights up in the dark!!!

The culture club
A group of us from the culture house hostel all went to the light show on the same night. Twas fun.

Random chinese people
They took photos of us so i took photos of them.

We climbed up that!
Ok so its not far but it was very steep

No Cheating!
Examination halls. Everyone gets their own little box

Pictionary
Our fantastic depiction of a train

Comments

[Immi]

HELLO!
HELLO! HOW ARE YOU?? CAN YOU HEAR ME?? :) this looks amaaaaazzing! i'm sorry its nearly over, I bet you wish it would never end... we will be glad to have you back though! xxxxxxxxxxxx