I am now officially on Spring Festival Break, which is the Chinese equivalent of Christmas Break and Easter Break combined. We have a little more than a month off.
For the first week of break I went to Hainan Island (海南) with my host family and Jonas. Hainan is the most southern point in China, and it is LOVELY and WARM!!!!!!!!!
Shanghai at this point is pretty cold, we are expecting negative five tomorrow, so I was really ready to go some place warm. My host family also has a strange habit: They believe that every so often we need to "change the air."
Changing the air entails opening every window in the house and leaving them open for an hour or so. Now in my humble Californian opinion there is NO REASON in the whole wide world that in zero degree weather the air would EVER need to be changed. Seriously, no amount of stuffiness short of someone or something dying in the house could possibly justify lowering the indoor temperature into the 30s or 40s. And, for the record, the house is not stuffy so far as I can tell. However, as I sit and write, the windows of my room have again been opened to allow the glorious outdoors entrance. Oh, and we are on the seventh floor, so we get cold wind up here.
The point of that being to illustrate how ready I really was for an island vacation.
We left home at 3:30 in the afternoon and to make a long story short we traveled for a REALLY LONG TIME.
(Hianan is a 2 1/2 hour flight from Shanghai)
At 2 a.m. the next morning we got to our hotel in Hainan... Don't ask me where the time went...
I knew that we were going on an organized tour of Hainan, but I was still picturing most of my time spent reclining on a beach, attempting to avoid sunburn, and swimming a lot. That was not quite what ended up happening...
It turns out that we were part of on of those frightening tour buses of Asian people that you see all over the world. You know, they pour out of a bus and follow around a guy with a flag and a microphone... And they all have matching hats... Yep, that was me. I even have the hat... Really, it is khaki and says Aristocracy Tours on it...
The Chinese have been trained from a young age that being first matters... A LOT. So when the time came to get on the bus there was a minor brawl over who got on first. Of course, my host mom and dad won.
We were really lucky in our tour guide. Not only was he nice,but he spoke relatively slowly and enunciated very clearly, so I had a fighting chance to understand him.
We had landed in Haiko (海口) but we didn't spend much time there. Our first stop was at the center built for the Boao Forum for Asia. This apparently is an annual economic meeting that takes place in Hainan. And lets face it, if you were an Asian economic leader who had to have a lengthy meeting every year to talk about finance, wouldn't you want to do it in a beautiful island location?
It was built at a location with great feng shui (风水) Because it is at the junction of three different types of water: a river, a lake, and the ocean. So we took a boat out to a really awesome beach where one side of it was the beach of a river and the other was the ocean.
(in front of the river part of the beach)
That afternoon we went to the Botanical Gardens of Hainan, which were wonderful. Besides having a lot of different tropical plants I hadn't seen before, but which were invariably very pretty, they grew several crops. They were famous for several types of tea, coffee, and coco. They also grow some of the Vanilla that Häagen-Dazs ice cream uses. So at the end of our tour we got to taste a bunch of the different teas and coffees that they made in the (successful) hope that we would buy some afterwards. They made a really good coco from their coco and coconut milk. They also made a really good mixture of coco and coffee.
(at the tea/coffee tasting in the Botanical Gardens)
Hainan is coconut central. I have never drank so many coconuts in my life, but why drink water when you could drink a coconut? Right? Except for one tiny issue. Coconuts have a ton of liquid inside them, and we kept drinking them and then getting on 2 hour bus rides... bad idea...
We ended up eating at an assigned table with the same people every meal. One of them was a young Chinese boy. You hear people joke about "The Little Emperor Syndrome" This is a joke based on the one Child policy: because the Chinese can only have one child some people respond by giving their kid absolutely anything and everything that they show the slightest inclination to want, thus creating children who think that they are emperors. This Chinese boy was the greatest example of it that I have ever seen. It was really interesting to watch. the entire table of 11 people fed into it. They all made sure that the kid got the best of everything. One night we had an incredible seafood dinner, but the little emperor did not want to eat seafood so the adults convinced the wait staff to make a plate of meat especially for him.
That night after dinner we had dinner two, which was a bunch of fun. Hainan is famous for having little stands where you pick the fish (or other item) of your choice and they will put it on a skewer and grill it for you. We got several fish between us and went to town.
Unfortunately Jonas gets slightly bus sick and we were spending a lot of time on the bus the first day, so he did not have as much fun as he might have.
Aside from coconuts Hainan is fruit central, and all of it is AMAZING. I could happily have lived entirely on fruit without ever eating anything else. It was all sosososososo good.
The second day was official beach day. In the morning we drove to a beach and took a boat out to an island. It was absolutely gorgeous. Covered in palm trees and with the insane green colored water and everything. I was in heaven.
(on the island)
On that island you could go scuba diving if you wanted to. It was a little chilly before the sun came out and we didn't have much time to go so we decided not to, but there were mannequins in wetsuits meant to illustrate the scuba diving fun. I have yet to decide if they were some of the funniest or most frightening things I have ever seen.
That afternoon we went to what was supposed to be a candidate for most beautiful beach in Hainan. It was gorgeous. I am also in love with it because I finally got to go swimming. I really am a complete beach girl, I am pretty much at my happiest swimming around in the ocean, and i made the most of my opportunity.
My host family was incredibly impressed. I guess my host dad can keep himself afloat in the water, angel has done the equivalent of swim p.e. so she is proficient, and my host mom can't swim at all. So now they think that I am incredibly graceful and super skilled which is kind of nice. They were very entertained by me diving around in the water and started to gesture for what they wanted me to do. I had a bunch of fun.
Unfortunately it was really windy, so when Jonas and I got out of the water lying on the beach was somewhat equivalent to getting sand blasted... So we buried each other, which was I think that most entertaining thing that the population of China had ever seen, no joke.
The Chinese have a very different philosophy of beach going to Americans, and pretty much everyone else for that matter. If you take away the black hair and all other Chinese characteristics you can still look at the beach and tell exactly who the Chinese are. There are the Russians, Jonas, and I in bathing suits, and the Chinese in Long pants and jackets. Keep in mind that it is roughly 80 in the sun...
The next day in the morning we went to a major religious center. Hainan has the 3rd tallest statue in the world. It is a 108 meter tall statue of Guan Yin (觀音) The goddess of Mercy. It was an insanely beautiful statue. It is all of white stone with a gold top.
This was also one of the first times that I have seen my host family do anything religious. They bought incense and lit it at the smaller temples to the individual budahs. They really went all out for angel though. There was one budah that was supposed to help people succeed in their studies. Angel lit incense, kow towed, and donated money so she could write her name in a book to be remembered in the monks prayers to that Budah.
That afternoon we went to another beach. That beach was apparently famous for its rocks. One major feature of Chinese tourism is not so much going to the place itself, but getting the right pictures while you are there. This beach was a madhouse as far as pictures went. There was one specific rock... I think we waited half and hour and almost got into a fistfight to get pictures in front of it... It isn't something that I really understand.
Our last day we went to a beach in the morning. My host family decided to go for a walk up and down the beach,but Jonas and I relaxed on chairs in the sun. we put some stuff on the chairs and then went to get a coconut. When we came back there was a Russian woman on my chair. We tried to explain to her that it was my chair but that turned out to be surprisingly difficult. She only spoke Russian. We know this because we tried all the languages at our disposal, and between Jonas and I that is a fair number. We ran through Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and German, none of which got us anywhere. We finally had to fall back on good old fashion sign language to get the message across.
We spent the rest of that afternoon bussing it back to Haiko to catch our plane. We got to the airport at 7 p.m. for an 11:30 plane, and as soon as wee got through the airport doors peple started a full out sprint to be the first to get to the checkout counter. I've never seen anything like it for a plane leavinin more than 3 hours from an airport with, in total, 16 gates in one terminal. However, my host faily again "won" and were the second people in line. It turns out that the point of this was so that we could get seats at the very front of the plane so we could get off first... That makes sense in theory, but... First we were all going to have to get our baggage from the same place, and it wasn't going to get there faster becasue we sprinted for it. Second, we were all going back to Shanghai on the same bus... Oh well.
Now I am back in Shanghai and it is cold. It is going to get below freezing for most of next week and I am not pleased. I WANT MY BEACH BACK!!!!! One thing that Jonas and I were talking about was that Shanghai doesn't seem to have a beach... I mean why not? The name of the city is "on the sea" so where is the beach??? I guess it is just one of the questions for the ages.
Next week is spring festival and then I am going to meet my parents in Vietnam, so I will try to get another post in soon.
See ya!
1 comment:
BEING FIRST IS CRITICAL! I'd forgotten about that.
-sv
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