And so it begins, again

I left just over a week ago from my comfortable life in Shanghai to explore Southeast Asia for the next month, as I have a decent break between semesters.

My plan was to go to Vietnam first, and by train. Long story short, that didn’t work out, for a variety of reasons, mostly relating to visa issues. But, it wasn’t too big of a deal. In any event, my first step was to take a train from Shanghai to Shenzhen, several hours after celebrating my friend David’s birthday party.

It’s a fairly long train, though not nearly as long as the one that goes to Yunnan. It was about twenty hours long. The main difference this time is that I was all by myself; no dozen other friends around to help pass the time one way or another.

However, it WAS an overnight train, and I chose the cheapest (lowest quality) seat possible, instead of a bed. This meant I didn’t have a chance in hell of actually sleeping, especially once my fellow Chinese passengers (there were no other sorts of passengers around) knew that I could speak Chinese. They thought that was pretty nifty, and wanted to chat with me as much as possible.  At one point, a Chinese guy who worked on the train basically as a merchant (he wore a train personnel’s uniform but was selling random crap, like electronic cigarettes) tried to make fun of me a bit, assuming I didn’t know what he was saying. I refuted that, and he was instantly embarrassed, and the entire car laughed at his expense.

The other people around me were nice. Across from me were three working class middle aged dudes, and next to me was an approximately thirty year old woman and then a guy about the same age as me. Across the aisle was another four people, all basically young people, and then throughout most of the night there was some people standing in the aisle (that’s how it rolls in China, they oversell tickets, so the last ones on just have to stand). We ended up chatting all through the night, despite the fact that I desperately wanted to sleep. I had a hard time understanding some of the things that one or two of the guys said, because they had really thick accents, and they knew it. The others even made fun of them, saying I had a more standard accent than they did. I’m not sure if they were serious or not, but it made me feel pretty cool at the time.

Anyhow, eventually the train finally came to an end, and I arrived in Shenzhen at around . . . maybe 10am? From there, I had to take a metro and a short walk to my hostel for the night, and that was pretty easily navigable. Once I got out of the metro, I was treated to the surprise that Shenzhen is a rather nice city, very clean and very green. It has a huge reputation for having sprung up out of the ground in the last fifteen years, and I equated this with poor planning and lots of pollution. Boy was I wrong.

That was probably the second nicest thing about my stint in Shenzhen. The nicest was seeing my friend Jing again, who arrived at the hostel to meet me only maybe 10 minutes after I got there. It was a pretty nice hostel by the way, and also had its fair share of green around.

She had gotten the day off from work to hang out with me, and we made a plan to go to one of Shenzhen’s beaches, as its supposed to have some of the nicest beaches in China. In particular, we went to a beach called Xiaomeisha, but not before going back to the rail station to figure out how I can continue the rest of my journey. After a bit of time, I find out I just can’t get there from here, if you get my meaning, so I realize I’m probably just going to have to alter most of my travel plans for the month, and start off in Guangzhou, which I bought a ticket for to go to the next day. Before all this, we also stopped by a Starbucks so I could grab a halfway decent cup of coffee. This Starbucks location was right around the corner from my hostel, and had the strangest entrance I've ever seen to one:

Anyway, after getting that ticket, we headed by bus to Xiaomeisha. It took about an hour to get there, but there we got, and it was the only beach I’ve ever been to that had an admission fee. It was rather pretty though, I guess, and the first time I’d been to a beach in six months, so I couldn’t complain too much.  Here’s some pictures of it:

We mostly just hung out on the sand at first, and I took a short nap to try to help combat the lack of sleep from the night before, but afterwards crawled out on some rocks and got another couple of nice views of the beach from further out, as well as some islands off the coast, and a small Buddhist shrine at the end of the rocks.

Had to do some weird acrobatic finagling to manage getting to the end though, especially at the bridges that were in fact just horizontal ladders, which Jing’s boots with heels were not really well equipped for. 

Afterwards, we headed back to town, and were soon on our way to go to a park nearby, which Jing told me you could see Hong Kong from. We went back to my hostel first, because I needed to check something, and because it was close to that park. While there, we checked a map to see how to get there, and it looked like maybe you could walk, but Jing persuaded me to take a bus, which ultimately was the best decision, even though it was probably walkable if you had more time available to you.

It was just two bus stops away, and was actually a pretty decent public park, right on the edge of the water. We trotted along here for a while, and I had my first fresh coconut juice, as shown here:

Aside from that, we just took in the views, which weren’t spectacular, but still at least interesting enough. It was weird looking upon Hong Kong from our vantage point. Of all the well known cities in China, it was always the one I was least interested in. Little did I know, soon I’d be there.

Jing and I also researched a couple of restaurants in town to go eat at, and settled for Indian food, which she had never had before. We went to a place that was frequented mostly by foreigners, that had a lot of diverse kinds of restaurants, and found our Indian place, and had some nice spicy curries. She loved it, and it was pretty good. I got some extra naan bread to go, to carry with me for at least the next day of traveling. After that, we had to part ways, because I had to go back to the hostel and do some tutoring, before trying to get a decent night’s sleep. It was sad to part with her again, she’s a fantastic friend, but that’s just how it has to go sometimes.

That was pretty much it for my adventures in Shenzhen. After I took a taxi back to the hostel, I did my tutoring thing, then just spent an hour or two trying to figure out the next step of my trip. The next thing I knew, I’d be going to Guangzhou, another place I never saw myself visiting.