I am now in Shenzhen, we arrived this morning. We were supposed to arrive last night, but our flight was delayed two hours, which wasn't much fun. [It was bad because I was dog-tired and we had to go back and forth on bus rides when I felt like I just didn't want to stand up but could barely think coherently. Then my seat wouldn't go back so I half-dozed uncomfortably. But we *did* get some enjoyment in the airport waiting room, watching this international male model pageant. There were all these guys in their underwear, made you think of Tarzan or something. I thought it was extremely funny. Somehow girls in bikinis aren't *funny* as are guys in Speedos, lumbering onto the stage and posing.]

I was pretty tired, but these things happen when you travel, I guess. Mei called her father to tell him we'd be late, but he didn't see fit to tell his friend who was meeting us at the airport. The poor man was waiting for us for three whole hours before we finally emerged at Shenzhen airport. I fell into bed at 3am.

There have always been nice people waiting to meet us. At Beijing, Jung waited in the morning cold to deliver a bankcard and come with us to our hotel. In Xi'an we were met by our tour company, ditto Hangzhou; they helped us with our luggage and took us where we needed to be. In Shanghai we were met by Ling and someone from Ling's father's company who took us on the more than 1 1/2 hour trip to Ling's house; others from his company took us on other trips, like to the airport yesterday. In Shenzhen Mei's family friend met us to drive us here, even waiting until 2am.

Nice, nice, I'm happy because people have been so kind, even if we can't understand each other. Take Ling and her family, for example. They provided transport for us, looked after our luggage while we were in Hangzhou, washed our clothes, made us three meals, let me use the Internet, let us stay there yesterday afternoon, rearranged my suitcase so everything fit, gave me some photos of Shanghai at night, gave me a set of Chinese coins, carried my heavy suitcase for me, saw us all the way to the departure gate at Pudong airport (about 2 hours from their house)... and I never met them before. Sooo nice!

16 Dec - Mon - 10:45pm

Continuing from yesterday's train of thought, people weren't so nice on the plane. Mei said "Chinese are only nice to you if they can get money out of it". Or, I would add, if they have any relationship to you at all, no matter how slight. Like your being the friend of their daughter's friend. And some people are just plain nice because it's their nature.

Like this guy at the Chinese Folk Cultural Villages today, who gave me a happy feeling. He saw so nice, and let me take a photo with him, and tried out a little English on me, and asked me a few friendly questions. He was so good looking too. ^_^. I love young Chinese guys, they often have this casual, attractive atmosphere of laughing fun and good humoured niceness. It seemed funny to see a Wa villager, a representative of this remote tribal village, speaking English. We got a photo in front of his house.

The Chinese Folk Cultural Villages is where we went today; it's a big and beautiful place made up of 'villages' of 56 nationalities of China - like the Miao, Mongolians, Tibetans, Li, Wa... the 'villages' feature maybe a couple of traditional-style houses from that nationality, with traditional furniture and tools. The employees of that 'village' are people actually of that nationality, recruited to work in the park, and they wear their culture's clothes, can speak its language, etc. The most amazing part is that these people actually *live* in these villages - they work there but these village houses you can village are actually their *homes*. Some villages have shows - dancing, music, just something that shows something of their culture.

The Wa village was a kind of jungle-y, primitive village with animal skulls and other decor that made it look fierce. The Wa show (emcee'd by the aforementioned guy I got a photo with) involved agressive dancing by the dark-skinned Wa people, stomping their feet and brandishing spears. It was funny to return to this village a while after the show, just before the villages closed to the public... we saw these same guys, the fierce warriors, winding down for the evening; two of them were wandering around casually wearing just pairs of pink pyjama trousers, the guy-I-got-a-photo-with was calling greetings to passers-by and singing to himself, in a very nice voice. The photo Mei took was in front of his house, a kind of hut. I find it amazing that these people, all young people, originally from their own regions, actually lived in a kind of theme park.

Today was very good, I really enjoyed the villages. We spent eight hours there quite easily. It was really beautiful with the Singapore style of beauty (kind of a tropical, warm atmosphere with water and lush green trees), and we saw many shows, in particular a lot of dancing. But we also saw top-spinning tricks, bamboo jumping, coconut breaking, sword climbing (actually climbing a 'ladder' made of sharp swords!), acting, singing, musical instruments... it was all very cool. We also saw a re-enactment, on horseback, of wars in Genghis Khan's day, and in the evening, the most amazing and beautiful dance show you can imagine.

Shenzhen seems like a cool city. Mei's dad cooked us both lunch and dinner, and I'm happy to say I managed to make a reasonable job of both of them; he is a good cook and the food was nice.

Mei said that in China, people go shopping every day so that the day's meals will be fresh. My experience with eating meals in a Chinese home... they have several dishes form which everyone helps themselves as they please. If they think that you like a particular dish they will continually move it closer to you. If you eat slowly (ie, don't dive for the next piece while still chewing the current one) they will say "eat, eat!" and urge you not to be shy. If you eat quickly - a good idea, to show you enjoy it - you will probably be full while everyone else is still gathering steam.

They will tell you at least once every meal to "eat as much as you want". Fish is always served whole, chicken pieces are always served with bones, and you put these inedible bits of bone and fat on the table to the side of your bowl. Your bowl contains steamed rice and any items from dishes you have collected.

Chinese apartment buildings don't have lifts; this has led to our lugging huge suitcases up five or six flights of stairs.

The street that Mei's father's flat is on is under construction, it seems. You can hardly breathe the air; numerous passing trucks exhale noxious fumes, which are mixed with the dust in the air from the people digging up the side of the street. It is dirty, feels unsafe at night, and you have to watch your step.

But this is not representative of Shenzhen as a whole; as a new city, it is cleaner, more modern,, less untidy and haphazard than Beijing or Xi'an. We went shopping yesterday evening. I bought four F4 CDs, among others, and some Game Boy Advance/Color games that I hope will work. [Note: They do, and are even in English. ^_^.] Much of it's bootlegged and came very cheap. It being Sunday, the city streets were quite crowded. Most people have weekends off so the shops stay open then to increase their profits.

In Shenzhen the prices are very cheap; I keep finding myself thinking "I know I don't need that, but it's such a good price, maybe I should get one in case I'll need it some day..."

Buses come every five minutes or so, so if you miss one, it's no biggie. We walked to the bus stop and took the trip, with Mei commenting on how much it had changed in four years - "oh, my favourite restaurant is closed... what? These shops weren't here before... there used to be a tall building right there..."

17 Dec - Tue - 8:25am

I must get up-to-date. Shenzhen is a hot city, at least compared to where we've been. It's kind of warm and tropical. Finally I was down to one layer of clothes - jeans and a t-shirt - but I was still kind of hot and sweating. What is most amazing is that it seems impossible to find summer clothes in the stores and I have yet to see a single person in short sleeves - *everyone* is wearing cardigans, jackets, skivvies... it's very strange. Mei said that the people in Shenzhen are so used to it being hot that they're very sensitive to the cold - but it's not the slightest, tiniest bit cold. [Apparently it's a Chinese thing to dress according to the season rather than the actual weather - if it's winter, you wear warmer clothes, even if it's not cold.]

Back to the cultural villages yesterday; apart from seeing shows and wandering through houses, we went on one of those boat rides where everyone got wet (I got the wettest; an elephant got me full in the back, but it was nice to get cool for a while), saw lots of peacocks at the Dai village who were interested in me because of my pancake, entered replica temples, and refused all invitations to come up on the stage and dance. ^_^. There were lots of half-grown chickens everywhere, and a marketplace/village built over and around a river through the palm trees. It was a nice place.

The final show was definitely the best, though - now this was a professional act, and stunning. Definitely one of the highlights, if not *the* highlight, of this trip. The costumes, themes and performers were all Chinese; they danced different places (Hangzhou, where girls danced with umbrellas as fountains opened up on stage and doll-like figures crossed a 'bridge' in the background, fierce tribal dances, Tibet, where the air was filled with delicate dancing 'snow' and there were men dressed as shaggy yaks) and different themes.

At one time there were guys tumbling wildly, flipping all over the stage, at another there was a single girl in a white dress, and her lover, flying gracefully through the air, silhouetted against a white moon. The beauty of the people, the costumes, themovement, the choreography, the settings, the music... oh, it was amazing and very gripping.

I really, really hate bok choy. I will be quite happy never to taste one again. They appear at almost every meal (tofu is also popular, though I can't for the life of me work out why). They're so slimy and have this distinct, unpleasant taste.

Walking home last night, we passed a small park where music was playing; there were a bunch of people there, dancing, just for the fun of it, out in the open air.

People in China carry around jars of green tea like we would bottles of water; green tea is the Chinese water, you get it free with many meals, and drink it constantly.

Dec 19 - Thur - 1:10pm

Right now I am in the reception area of a YWCA in Hong Kong, waiting for Mei to return from a nearby Internet cafe. I am hoping we can get a room for the discounted price offered on the 'net, which is about HK$200 cheaper!

On Tuesday in Shenzhen we went to Happy Kingdom (a kind of amusement park), on Wednesday we went to the zoo in the morning and shopping in the evening.

And today we are in Hong Kong. I hope there will be sufficient time to go to Victoria Peak today; we're being delayed here 'cos they can't find our hotel reservation, and we were delayed in Customs, so we're rather later than anticipated.

Hong Kong is so close to Shenzhen; actually, you can see Hong Kong from Mei's father's kitchen. It took a lot less time to go to Hong Kong than to go to Shenzhen zoo. I got a bit of a scare in Shenzhen customs when I took a photo of Mei with her father, which was apparently taboo, although there were no signs posted saying otherwise. Then in Hong Kong customs, Mei got taken away for half an hour by security because of her new passport.

Hong Kong is green and lush, like parts of Shenzhen, busy and full of buildings like Shanghai, and kind of dirty-looking, like Beijing. In addition, everything seems more closed-in, less spacey - the streets seem narrower, the buildings closer to the road, etc, giving the city a slightly more compact and crowded look than anywhere we have been previously.

Happy Kingdom was fun. It's a theme park like Disneyland, divided into themed 'lands'. We entered via Cartoon Street which made me think "oh great, we're in a little kid place" but it soon got better. We went on a big and fast rollercoaster. I didn't feel sick, although Mei did, and another girl on it with us got off and threw up. Poor girl. It was a very rough, jolting ride though, kind of uncomfortable/painful.

We went on other rides too... I went on a ride like the Top Spin, although it was obviously designed for people smaller than me, as my main memory of that ride was the bar which crunched so tightly into my leg that I was screaming (in pain!) when we hung upside down, because all the pressure was on that leg. We went on a kind of 'river rapids' boat ride which was a lot of fun too, we went on it twice. You can buy a 40c full-body raincoat, which you definitely need, because there are sprays, splashes, etc. There are a couple of points where other theme park goers can pay to use these water guns and can send a blast of water at you as you go past. ^_^.

Apart from rides, there were a whole bunch of different things to look at. There were a number of shows. We enjoyed the somewhat strange spectacle in Wild West Land of a Filipino band in a Chinese themepark, singing (in English) about "Old West Virginia". There was this water place with all these devices that try to trick you into getting you drenched. There was this cool audio 'horror show' which was quite funky - you put on headphones, the lights go out, and it feels like there are people screaming and moving around behind you and whispering suddenly in your ears and stuff like that. Of course it's just sounds coming through the headphones, but it really makes it sound like the things are happening in various places around the room.

We walked through the Shangri-La mountains and, naturally, ate lots of food. Basically, we had a really good time. Our feet got pretty sore after eight hours, but it was nice to just relax and have fun all day.

*laughs* There was one other ride we both went on, Mei talked me into it. It's one of those little 'boats' that travels along a track and goes for a leisurely trip uphill, and then suddenly goes downhill very fast where it splashes into the water, and the water sprays alongside the sides of the boat. We decided to go on it. We decided we were too cheap to buy the 40c raincoats; we'd both been on rides like this before and you never got very wet on them. Besides, a bit of a splash would be nice; the weather was warm.

So we went on it, and we got Absolutely SOAKED. I feel like I've never seen so much water in my life. I closed my eyes when we were going down, and opened them as we hit the bottom - and all I could see, on either side and above me, was great walls of water. I couldn't see anything but water. We were so satched. The two of us just cacked and cacked. We were still wet about five hours later.

In the evening they had a cool show about World War II, with the Japanese invading a Chinese village. They asked for volunteers, so me and Mei went up with a couple of others. We became members of the Chinese army, and got to wear cool clothes and run across the screen. They said to follow them very carefully so that we didn't accidentally set off one of the 'mines' they use for explosions in the show. Hahhh... It was a lot of fun though. We also got to stand in front of a firing squad. ^_^.

After the show we went and had Japanese food for dinner. It was pretty nice. But the one bad point of this park was the Christmas music they kept playing. It was really bad - cheesy and cute, with bad singing, in English, the worst songs possible, and they kept playing it over and over. I must have heard "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth" about ten times. I can't believe the staff didn't go stark raving mad hearing that music all day. It literally was all day, and all over the place - wherever you went, they had speakers blaring the stuff. You couldn't get away from it.

When we left the park, I noticed that the Window to the World theme park across the road (a park containing many miniature versions of world wonders) was *also* playing the exact same music we'd been subjected to all over again. I mean, at least Happy Kingdom is the kind of place sort of justified to cutesy music, but to have it infecting somewhere like Window to the World seems a bit inappropriate. That day wasn't the only day I heard this awful music in Shenzhen either. I don't know why anyone would buy it.

On Wednesday we went to the zoo. It was quite a long way away. We felt sooo stiff and tired from the last two days of intense walking. Our feet hurt even when we started. But after a bit of initial ouching, it was much better.

A zoo's a zoo, not a great deal to say. We saw an elephant and a seal show. The first part of the elephant show was actually a gymnastics show. One of the gymnasts was a very small girl, about 4 years old, who could do some remarkable things, and another girl, about 7. Mei commented that these girls would have come from very poor families. It makes me think of 'Nihao my concubine' although I don't know what it would have really been like.

There was one monkey that spat at me. The zoo itself was mostly pretty decent, the enclosures were humane and stuff.

We went shopping in the late afternoon. The shops are all open late. We looked in some posh-ish shops which I didn't like - why buy expensive stuff in such a cheap country? And we walked down one of those shopping streets, a long pedestrian mall with lotsa shops. We bought more bootlegs and ate dinner-by-snacks. By that I mean, instead of sitting down to a meal somewhere we bought miscellaneous things from vendors, and ohhh was it good. I had a kind of sweet pancake, some barbequed meats, this interesting rice-and-chicken thing, and two cream puffs. Ohh, yum yum yum yum. I tried a strawberry cream puff just because of the Shonen Knife song, but I actually liked the normal cream puff better. ^_^.

Next day we headed off to Hong Kong.

We walked down a long street to get to Nathan Road so we could get a bus. The street had lots of churches, schools, hospitals, that sort of thing. We had lunch at a cheap hole-in-the-wall place, noodle soup with mutton balls. We also stopped at a bakery, and oh, I swear, Hong Kong bakeries are small but soooo good, soooo delicious, ohhh yum. I'm drooling just thinking about that sponge cake.

We were in Kowloon, right, so we took a bus down to the Star Ferry and took it across to Hong Kong Island. Can you believe that a ferry ride costs less than a bus ride? But we got to see some Hong Kong just walking to Nathan Road, then driving down Nathan Road. We saw a tiny basketball court, near the road, a big library on one side, a school across the road, it just looked like someone's desperate attempt to put in a place where someone could get some exercise, in this crowded, closed-in environment.

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