Nanning - 'Your Portal to Vietnam!'

Its 3am on the 13th. Starr and I just knocked out a 32-hour train ride from Shanghai to Nanning. I kind of feel like we're sprinting out of China (which is a bad thing) to meet her friend in southern Vietnam by the 22nd or 23rd. I wanted to stop in Guilin and Yangshuo on the way down, but she's nervous about getting a visa in time so we abandoned that leg of the trip. On the positive side, its finally warm.

The train ride was ok but Starr is sick. Wicked sick. She sounds like crap right now to be perfectly honest, but we're both drinking 6 or 7 cups of green tea daily and she found some Robitussin (sp?) in Shanghai. She was playing with this little kid on the train, where she would draw a picture of something and he would name it in Chinese. It was cute but I don't think either of us retained anything he taught us. Plus, as we're about to leave China for Vietnam, it doesn't matter.

Our hotel in Nanning is fucking sweet. Its a 2-star hotel. Not that the hostels were bad (with the exception of the Beijing one, which had some pretty rancid bathrooms) but we're clearly coming up in the world. We have a computer and internet access in our room, a TV with an English station, a clean bathroom, western-style toilet, towels, and free little soaps and shampoo. The hostel in Beijing didn't even have toilet paper in the bathroom (actually pretty standard in China it seems). And how much would you pay for all this awesomeness? Only 98 yuan my friend, or less than 6 and a half bucks each. This place is about 4 hours from the Vietnamese border too, which means that after we get our visas, we're practically already there. In fact everything in this room is in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese.

Nanjing was a good place to stop but it still marked a low-point in the trip. I really really really really really really really wanted to see the museum about the Japanese occupation, but as its the 70th year anniversary or something like that, it was closed for renovations. I was so disappointed. In addition to that, the staff at the hostel was terrible. It was only one girl in particular, but the rest of them were friends with her, so they're all guilty by association. The one girl we would up liking couldn't speak English so she just smiled a lot and never charged us for the internet. She was pretty cool. We couldn't get any trains here from Nanjing so we were forced to backtrack to Shanghai to book tickets. That pissed up off too. We would up pounding beers in our hotel room on the last night instead of going out. It was necessary.

Also, when I left Japan my roommate David gave me Buddha's Little Finger by Pelevin. I recommend it. Currently reading The Brothers Karamazov which was a gift from D. Thanks again.