post from the road

me and carla are currently at our hostel in east huangshan in a small town called tanjiaqiao. it has been quite and adventure so far and i really need to get better at chinese. anywho our adventure began in guangzhou where we had to get sitting tickets on the train rather than the sleepers. apparently we decided to travel on the weekend of the second largest holiday in china, didnt know that before. we got on our already cramped traincar to find that not only were all of the seat taken but people had paid to just stand in the aisle way as well. so pretty much imagine an airplane filled with people so you couldnt even get up to go the bathroom. luckily as we traveled on some left and space freed up. it was still an 18 hour train ride in which i slept about 2 hours. carla wound up reading ender's shadow in one sitting without really stopping and we then also watched a considerable amount of friends and the fifth element. i stayed up all night to make sure we didnt miss our stop at 3:45am.

and so we arrived in the city of tunxi at about 4am where we were swamped by taxis and people offering tours and such. after running away from them to think for a minute we got a taxi to take us to our hostel which was a little off the beaten path. we arrived at the hostel by 5 or so and slept in the lobby until we could check in at 7am. and to my surprise they didnt have our reservation, but they had availability anywho. we got out room and promptly crashed. later in the day we wandered around the local villages. we wandered across the street to the only village in town to awkwardly ask for some friend rice. we went back to our room to watch some more friends and relax. we later discovered a bbq at the back of our hostel which was a nice surprise.