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Yea, We Missed The Train
2007-02-14 09:51:03
Oh, no. Our train from Shanghai leaves at about 4:30pm, so we intended to leave Hangzhou between 11:00 and 1:00 (the train ride is about two hours). I woke up around 9:00am, packed, and woke Yan-Shih. She got out of bed, prepared a little, then picked up the train tickets. "Oh, @!#$%!" "What?" "We are so screwed. The train leaves Shanghai at 11:24!" For those who can't do math, 9:30 + [time to train station] + [when time leaves] + 2 hours = screwed. Needless to say, there wasn't much chance we were going to catch the train, but considering we had to, we weren't going to give up. So, we ran out of the hostel, checked out, and jumped in a taxi to the train station. We tried to talk to the train people about swapping out the tickets for the next day, but they said we could only do that in Shanghai (the train still hadn't technically left). The next train for Shanghai was at 1:00 -; would we want a ticket for that? After some scheming, we decided to take the train two ...
More About: Rain , Train , Miss , TRAI

Umpa Lumpas
2007-02-14 09:51:03
Back in Guangzhou, things don't seem to be too bad. Yan-Shih woke me up again, wanting to brush her teeth. She kindly let me sleep after that, although I couldn't. At some point I decided to stop trying to fake sleep, and played some rummy. While in Guangzhou, we had two options: 1) buy the fast train ticket for 70kuai, leave in under an hour. Or 2) buy the slow train ticket for 45kuai, leave in five hours. Considering the cost to change my airline ticket would be 175usd (actually more than I paid for the round-trip ticket to begin with), we were in turbo-cheap mode. Normally we are just plain old cheap, but now we were REALLY cheap. We took the later train. As a reward, we decided to visit the little rice ball store that we liked so much. The store had, on endless repeat (same song the last time we were there), some version of The Umpa Lump a song, but in Chinese. You know, Umpa Lumpa Doomba Li Do, or whatever the words actually are. (Sorry if the song is now stuck in...

Goodbye Girlfriend, Hello FedEx
2007-02-14 09:51:03
The day was quite bittersweet. I dropped Yan-Shih off at the border so she could take her flight back, and I, dropping my head below my shoulders, took the subway back out to the hostel. For the next few days I would be trying to conserve money, just awaiting my passport.
More About: Girlfriend , Friend , Girl , Hell , Good

Mission Achieved, Back "Home"
2007-02-14 09:51:03
Luckily next to the hostel there was an Internet cafe, which I joined as a member. So, for my remaining time in Shenzhen, I spent the majority of the day in the cafe watching movies. My new roommates, one from Taiwan, the other from Canada (but originally from Mali), both snored heavily (and you know how much I like snoring). I enjoyed some great talks with the guy from Canada, as he shed light on his quest for securing a better future. As one could expect, downloaded material is everywhere in the cafe. I located one of the shares in the cafe, and there were hundreds of gigs of movies and shows. All pirated. I watched a few episodes of the TV show "Heroes", then watched half a season of "Prison Break", which is now one of my favorite TV shows. Meanwhile, to help myself academically, I read all the stories from my Continental Literature book that I wanted to, and for pure pleasure reading was given a book of Deja Dead, an international best seller suspense novel. It was ...
More About: Home , Back , Miss , Sion , Mission

China Images, Finally!
2007-02-14 09:51:03
I've finally taken the time to rotate, crop and upload the images from our trip to China . There are about 100 that I ended up posting, plus a few from my previous trip to China. If you are interested, you are more than welcome to view them on my gallery.Feel free to send me an email if find any of them interesting, I would love to hear what you think!
More About: Images , Final , Image , Finally