spent a big chunk of my thursday in the police office doing interview things for visa applications...it was dumb and pointless as is much of the bureaucracy of china. then the weekend came and friday we went out to futian and i slept on a floor for 4 hours before waking up to stumble my way home...to find that i was locked out of my apt. THEN i spent the rest of the day with a friend in another part of town to waste time until i could go home. so i went to an art expo area of shenzhen to see the very talented replicas that chinese people can make of famous art....seriously, not 1 original piece. (oh wait, some of this was saturday).
sunday, i guess, is the day i really wanted to write down to remember. So my friend Nick Chen (pictures below) and I hiked to the top of the highest mountain in shenzhen or in this province or something like that. it was a long hike, but worth it at the top. Made a few chinese friends on the way up which was cool...i have been completely impressed with how friendly everyone here is for such a big city.
anyway, the funny part came on the way down off the mountain. we got to a point where there were a few routes down and decided that we didn't want to go the same way down so we asked a few people if we could take a different trail. They of course encouraged us and said all the trails lead to the end and go down the mountain...i guess it would have been useful to ask WHERE the trails led....so we hiked for an hour and 1/2 without seeing a single person/pass an abandoned station/through a worker village/to the bottom of the sea port. NOT where we wanted to be...very far actually. So we ended up hitchhiking with a man named benjamin who gave us a lift for the about 20 minute drive back to the apt where we left from...
so that's my story for you people who read this...kind of long. anyway, news on top of this is we have national day off which means we have teh week sept 29 through oct 5 off and we're planning our vacation. So far it's fujian province, guilin/yangshuo, or philipine islands. what's everyone else's opinion? ps - we're still waiting on visas so it's entirely possible i might just be stuck here....
pics of new pad!
MY ROOM!
ROOMMATE BEN'S SMALL ASS ROOM
