So I am writing this
blog from my room in the Hainan University exchange hotel, Haikou City China. I
never would have guessed a month ago, this is where I’d be at this moment in
time. In fact, on a Thursday morning I would be at my clinic going crazy trying
to juggle patients and getting the payroll for the hotel done and hoping our
bank would process it on time. To cut a long story short, 4 invitees from
Samoa where brought over by the Chinese
Embassy to attend a 3 week tourism seminar/conference. Unusually, Samoa has the
largest number of participants (4) whereas other countries have either one or
at the most two invitees- makes you think a bit doesn’t it.
Anyways, it has taken 2 whole days of traveling to get
here. An overnight in Auckland, a 12 hour flight to Shanghai- 4 hours killing
time in their aiport and a 3 hour flight to Haikou, which is on an island South
of China ( had no idea it was on another island!lol)
The flight to China was Long to say the least…we got dinner
and breaky and I got maybe 4-5hours sleep. Arriving in Shanghai the first thing
I noticed was ?fog. Then I remembered my mother in law telling me how polluted
the air was in parts of China and if this indeed is the extent of that its
pretty scary. Surrounding the airport was what appeared to be a thick fog
blurring even the nearest airport hotel across the road from the airport. We didn’t do much exploring in what I am sure
is a huge airport, only because we suddenly felt so miniscule in the big pot of
China 20 something million people in this city alone…, were a little scared
we’d get lost so went straight to locate our departure gate and then parked up
at a coffee shop charging our cellphones and calling home. A young Chinese lad came and asked to take
photos with us which was kind of funny…
So my first taste of Chinese I guess would be the meal on Southern China Domestic airline which was a noodles and mince
concoction. My hopes for enjoying some traditional Chinese cuisine were not
satisfied by this option but I put it down to maybe just bland airport food??
There were like 3 other small packet things , one of which I opened and looked
to be some sort of fermented cabbage?? Like cabbage in a sauce which smelt
terrible…..hmmmm
Arrive in Haikou and its bloomin 34degrees Celsius. Even for
an Island girl getting above 30 is really not to my liking and I felt like a
sweltering pig in my wooly top picked to keep me warm on a long plane ride! The
two young ladies from the university who collected us were friendly and looked
dressed to be at a beach with very short ripped jean shorts and airy cotton topsJ I immediately regret
not bringing a pair of shorts L
The drive to the university had me and a friend joking about
the road rage our driver appeared to have but also secretly ensuring our seat belts
were fastened and clinging to our doors! The roads were narrow and lots of
bikes and carts and in some places the rules and lines seemed to blur and we,
more then once appeared to be heading straight towards an oncoming vehicle one
of which was an ambulance lol!! Our driver honked her horn practically the
whole way to our hotel and by the time we reached here I was truly relieved and
almost wanted to yell something along the lines of “Hallelujah!”…
Our room is on the 4th floor of a building whose
elevator is out of order. We are now all joking about how much weight we will
lose while we are here! Dinner last
night was broccoli and some other vege?? Sliced beef, ?duck…chicken wings, deep
fried chips, fried rice and fruits….Im still waiting to be awed by Chinese
food. Im sure it will be any day yetJ
2) it’s the morning of day 3 in china and I am awake at 5am.
I’ve woken at 5am every morning since arriving and struggle to go back to
sleep. You can hear the echo of birds bouncing
off the hundreds of large brick
buildings that make up the apparently 9 universities housed in this complex we
are staying in. Ive never seen so many 7 story buildings lined up uniformly in
the same area before. I counted 22 X 7 story buildings this morning on an attempt at some exercise
and this is only in the one small block we are located in…. It is kind of weird
but in a way- very Chinese. Its reassuring to hear the sound of birds because
sometimes when I stand on the hot balcony of this hotel room, the thickness of
the air and heat make me wonder if this
is just Hainans climate or if the air is thick with pollution. At least the birds are not dropping dead midflight which is almost what I expect with what I see, so
perhaps that is a good sign lol
Yesterday was our first day of lectures. Our first lecture
was in introduction to China and its history. It was interesting to learn about
how ancient the Chinese civilization is
and the struggles they have faced. But it was kinda amusing to hear so
many ancient proverbs being used to justify things being done in such a modern
era lol. They’d talk about bigger neighboring countries and use expressions
such as “we will not be bullied” and
“when going up the mountain, be prepared for vicious tigers” ….there was also
particular reference to a particular neighbor (se malo uncle Sam) and one
could easily read between the lines that their emotions towards this country
were not happy ones lol.
The lectures are really tiring because they are done in
Chinese and translated by a young lady whose English is not very good either. We’ve
had about 5 questions being asked so far in class and not a single one was
answered, I am sure it is because of the language barrier but it’s a bit frustrating
at times. One question asked was whether the Panda is a protected species and
the answer was to describe to us that Pandas are a symbol of peace to the
Chinese. We have given up on asking questions now….learn quick. We’ve had a
right jolly time trying to communicate basic things with hotel staff where we
are staying using our phone translator apps. We spent a good afternoon trying
to find an iron from reception and would enter the text into the translator to
write into Chinese “I need an iron please” and the response we got was “iron is
your translation”…we couldn’t figure out what the hell the receptionist was
going on about as this was always his answer but it later worked out that he
had given the iron previously to our “translator” and was trying to say it was with her!lol…
We are grateful to know that our meals are all provided. But
its been a bit of an underwhelming experience so far. We have to walk through a
local cafeteria to get to our meal room and when its busy there are people with
really interesting looking things on their plates…but our table always has
fried rice, steamed veges and Fries. Two basic meat plates like fried chicken
and beef stir fry…and watermelon for desert. I kid you not with the fries, we
get fries for breakfast (yes breakfast!) lunch and dinner. Served with Coke and
Orange juice!lol….its amusing but we think that perhaps they see us as foreigners
and think this s what we want!lol…Ive made a subtle request for dumplings and
local delicacies to our host so fingers crossed that we might get to sample
something exciting soon!
We went to the night markets last night. There are several
shops mostly a mixture of clothing, jewellery and accessories and food. It was
hard to find a shop with my size though and took me the whole night to find a
t-shirt that looked to fit me. Everything else you could see appeared to be fit
for size 6 size 8 stick think figures!lol. The ladies at the clothes shops kept laughing when trying to sign out the size of my ass (ie for pants) and I have since learned that in China, Im a XXXL...dang it!
Day 4.
Today we get to go sightseeing in the countryside. Apparently we will be going
to the beach. In one of our lectures earlier, a lecturer described Hainan as
being equivalent to Chinas “Hawaii”.
Having never been to Hawaii before I cant help but at this moment in
time think the only thing they have in common is the weather …although I am not
entirely sure even Hawaii has weather this hot. The tour guide was eager to tell
us there was a beautiful Beach but then went on to add “but you must remember
that China is a very Pollution..so don’t go far into the water”!!!....this
seems to be a common tone in a lot of their lectures and descriptions- owning
up and reminding everyone that “China is a lot of Pollution” …whats sad to see
is I don’t really see any effort to majorly tackle this issue. They say they
are developing Hainan to be Chinas Hawaii…but the streets are full of rubbish,
the air is polluted an so far every river I have seen is a thick dirty brown….there
are just too many people and I don’t know if they will ever be able to deal
with this problem!!
Yesterday we went to the big city and very quickly one was
swallowed in the enormity of Chinas Population. We had asked our tour guide if
he could stop by a shop where we could buy a simple phone to call home, and the
place they took us, along the way, was some 4 or 5 story building (shopping
mall with 4- 5 levels) with I am sure over a million products, all electronics .
Phones cameras laptops wires. It seemed like every store sold the same thing
and was crammed from the floor to the ceiling with shelves full of electronics.
There were so many stores the isles were small and crammed too… I couldn’t help but start feeling a bit
claustrophobic and just absolutely flabbergasted…what started as an itch to see
if I could buy a nice phone ended in a tarpit of indecisiveness and uncertainty
over what was real and what was fake.
The Samoan lot soon found ourselves outside by a food cart trialing
some Chinese Hotdog (savoury sausage on a stick…who knows what kind of meat it
was haha) and some Chinese round puff pancake things. The other thing about
Chinese is that probably 99.9 percent of them are thin. And you can see the
whole place is geared so that people are not encouraged to be lazy…so many
buildings with NO elevators….everyone just takes the stairs- that’s just normal…
when I bought 1 hotdog and a small bag of 8 pancake things (just a little
bigger then the size of a marble) the shopkeeper exclaimed that I was “eating a
lot!”..lol…as we stood outside the electronics mall I watched all the stall
vendors, one guy quite close by was eating his lunch which consisted of 3 small
round metal containers which had lovely steam fuming off it. In these 3 he was scooping into a small bowl in front of him, Rice, what appeared to be seaweed and boiled
watercress. That’s it. I couldn’t help buy envy him. If I tried to introduce
such a diet in my homeland of Samoa I am sure I would be shot!lol….
Funnily enough, our sponsors took us to Mac Donalds for
Lunch. As my sister in Law did warn, even McDees tasted a bit Chinese with the
chicken burger having two options of mild spicey or very spicey…and it
certainly was more of a Chinese spice J
Was rally thankful to be there though as
they had a Mc Café (YAY) And I had my first decent coffee on the trip which
immediately killed a lingering headache Ive had the entire time in China
(Coffee addict!) I was not impressed with the toilets however, the ladies had 4
toilets and they were all SQUAT toilets (OMG) our group had a good laugh
describing each persons attempt at trying to figure it out, didn’t know which
way we were meant to face and having to take all our bottom half clothes off in
fear of accidents OMG…like I will NOT miss this ever. Funnily our chinese hosts
claim to prefer these!
Heading into town was an experience. From
seeing fields of Taro planted in swampy land, to the several sky rising
buildings…and not just several like a handful…several like rows and rows and
rows, old ones new ones half complete ones… I felt like I was watching
something from star wars where the drone army surely must be kept….on this day
I really felt the enormity of the population of China…so many people they have to
live on top of each other….we are so fortunate in SamoaJ What I thought about though while watching all
the skyrising buildings was another statement our Chinese History lecture said
which was that they are not afraid of being bullied by the big powerful
countries because one of their weapons was a huge mobile human
workforce…hmmmm….they moral of the story is- don’t mess with the Chinese.
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