The King Donut

So, the next day, Jing and I got up bright and early to get a bus to Yongding Village, or Yongding County, depending on how you want to translate it. I guess county works a bit better, its not just one small village.

There’s one distinctive thing about Yongding county, and that’s the legacy left behind by the Hakka ethnic peoples who live in the area. The Hakkas were a pretty mobile people, and live over a vast swathe of East Asia, going as far south as Singapore and as far east as Taiwan, and their language is variously referred to as Hakka, Minnan (literally means “People of the South”) or Taiwanese, although only Taiwanese people (who are mostly not Hakka) call it Taiwanese.

A Taste of the Old World

So, the last trip took in China that I have to write about, aside from ones from the beginning of the year for which I’ve lost all pictures, but might be able to get around to sometime 4 or 5 months from now, was a trip I took during the spring to the province of Fujian, with the purpose of visiting three locations: Xiamen, Wutaishan, and Yongding Village.

I never actually got to Wutaishan, so this instead will just be about Xiamen and Yongding.

Onto Some More Rocks

So the next morning, I got up and ready to go to Yangshuo. I went to the cafe area of the hostel and ordered a sandwich, which was disappointing in the way that Western food made in Asian hostels usually is. Ya Ya, the girl I had agreed to go to Yangshuo with, also got up at the right time . . . I think at about 9:30am we set out for a bus to Yangshuo. It would be a short ride, but I did my best to make it horrible by allowing her to continue to talk to me about Taiwan.

A Few More Trips

I’m sitting now as I type this in the port of Mawei, a special district in the Chinese city of Fuzhou, located just across the straits of Taiwan. In approximately one and a half hours from the time I’ve started writing this, I’ll be aboard that boat, heading to Taiwan, and leaving China behind, for who knows how long.

This means a couple of things. First, it means that over the next couple days I’m going to crank out a couple of blog posts about previous travels that I haven’t yet covered, and maybe another couple of shorts about Shanghai.

A Trip Down the Thames . . . in Shanghai

A couple of days after the American Dream fiasco, I set off in the direction of yet another strange part of Shanghai that I had read about online. Only technically located within the administrative district of Shanghai, there was a housing development project in whats honestly another town, called SongJiang New City, where the community is designed to look as though it were old traditional England.

Yeah, you read that right. London in the suburbs of Shanghai. I can feel the eyes rolling now, and trust me, I did the same.

Breaking Into the American Dream

So, a few weeks ago, my former roommate Jillian Corey came to visit for a weekend. She was one of my three roommates from the first semester; although she went home for the Chinese holiday break during the month of February, she came back to China in March, but this time to Beijing, to pursue another semester of study. Finally she came down to visit, and amongst other things, we had one particular goal, which was to go break into the American Dream.

SMP, Shanghai's Barren Skatepark

So, you'll scarcely be able to find any information online about this place, although it does have its own website. Shanghai is home to the world's biggest skatepark, supposedly. Considering how there's no information on it on wikipedia, and its own website seems to have been updated last a couple years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the record has since been broken.