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Archive for June, 2007
Hi all,
I am going to have to keep this brief because it is getting late here and I’m feeling tired - to make a long story short….
We arrived in Chengdu yesterday afternoon (the place is quite big) it has apartment tower after apartment tower after apartment tower, and every so often there is another conglomeration of apartment towers under construction, it seems to be more intense in many ways than I remember Tokyo being. (I most definitely have not seen so much development occurring at once in my life until now)
I have met the parents and they are quite friendly, the culture difference has not been a great problem - although there is a bit of an issue in the sense that 1) While I am here Haixiao and I must sleep in seperate rooms to each other and we can not be seen holding hands in front of her parents 2) Her parents do not want her to live in a place with me (we were planning on renting an apartment on the university grounds). This means that we have had to change plans and go travelling sooner rather than later. How things will pan out is anyone’s guess - but I can confidently say that the parents have no objection to Haixiao being with me it is just that they are unlikely to allow her to stay with me on a permanent basis until I prove to them that I intend to live in a fixed residence in Chengdu with her while she studies - and by the time things get to that stage we are virtually at the stage where we should be engaged and/or married in their parents eyes. Anyway, her parents do not mind if she travels with me around China at all so we will be leaving here on Sunday and playing it by ear from there. One possibility aside from the time we will spend together while we are visiting eastern China is that we spend a while at qing cheng or emei mountain (maybe 2 or 3 hours bus from Chengdu) - accomodation there is quite cheap as is food etc - and it qualifies as ‘travelling’ as far as we’re concerned.
I apologise for not being able to upload any pictures (other than this old one of Haixiao and myself from my second day in China)
I spent a long time messing around with one picture (the fact that the software on this computer uses chinese characters is not helping much) but to no avail. I will be able to post some pictures in the near future (tomorrow I hope) but I just ened to spend some more time sorting things out. (I only got the Australian power adaptor today - and guess what - it turned out I didn’t even need to buy one, Chinese appliances seem to use two different sorts of plugs and one of them is identical to Australian powerplugs) - it seems ‘universal’ power-points are quite common here and it just so happened that her parents had a whole powerboard that I can plug my various bits into with no problem.
I hope things are well there - I am off to sleep - I slept in this morning and I don’t want to look lazy again tomorrow.
Cheers
Will
Hey Everyone 
Not much is new since I wrote my last post from zigong except that for the last couple of days I have been in very good health but unfortunately now Haixiao has a really sore throat that is being very persistent 
One cool thing we did recently was to go to the Zigong Dinosaur Museum on Sunday - it is apparently the largest dinosaur museum in asia and the second largest in the world - I have taken lots of photos for my two little nephews Ben and Bailey. (including some cool photos where Haixiao who is only 5′2 is standing next to this gigantic monster of a creature that must be nearly 20 times her height!) - very impressive to see. And of course I took a lot of photos of the fantastic ‘chinglish’ directions on the signs e.g. ‘Way Of Visiting –>’
The museum was actually built around (on top of) a site where a huge number of dinosaur bones and fossils were discovered. It had some fun things for children to do there as well as some massive fully reconstructed dinosaur skeletons on display. The whole place was unfortunately very hot due to poor ventilation and/or air conditioning.
P.S. I forgot to mention in my previous post that we had visited a fairly large Buddhist Temple fairly shortly after I arrived in Zigong - it was undergoing some renovation but I still got a couple of nice photos even if the temple itself was far from immaculate and had cement mixers and rubble scattered around, not to mention all the people clanging and banging with tools
Hi Everyone!
FYI The ATM issue sorted itself out somehow, it seems that some ATM’s around zigong are just wanky, I’m not sure why I haven’t been able to use my credit card yet but hopefully that will turn out to be a similar story and it will just magically start working in much the same way my bank card did.
Anyway I’m presently at an internet cafe in zigong, it is sunday and Haixiao will be donning her cute little graduation hat (I can’t think what they are called right now) and receiving her bachelors degree tomorrow. We will be leaving the ’shit city’ either late tomorrow or early on tuesday and we will be headed to Chengdu.
Mark wrote me an email about some of the things he had seen on google earth when looking at Zigong
hi everyone,
sorry it has taken me so long to get around to posting anything here - i still can’t find a power converter from australia->china so internet access is not as convenient as I hoped. (this is despite being in a city of 3 million people). Anyway, I arrived in Chengdu on monday afternoon as planned, from the moment I left customs Haixiao ran up to me and held me and we kissed etc etc, (it was all very nice). Then after the initial amazement of seeing each other for the first time we hopped in a taxi, (I was a little troubled to discover that it did not have any seatbelts in the backseat and I have since found that none of them do). We went to a hotel and just spent the night there together getting to know each other although we did go out for dinner.
My first chinese meal was very very nice (despite costing only 40 yuan, the equivalent of $6 or $7AUD)
Had a quick phone chat with Will today.
He has bought a prepaid mobile phone over there and you can email me and I will reply with his number.
Click here to calculate the time in China.
For those of you that just want news of his travels:
Will has arrived safely in Zigong and is spending time with his girlfriend Haixiao. (pronounced hi-sh-ouww I think) Everything is going great expect for the fact that he has not been able to find a power adapter for his notebook - therby limiting his Internet access thus far. He has commented that he and Haixiao are getting along great and seem very compatible.
His comment was that things are in China just how he expected but “even more so”, and that the roads are very dangerous, the taxis, for example, do not have seat belts.
The other interesting thing is that everywhere he goes the locals stare at him and there are very very few (if any) other westerners.
He told me that he will try and get on to post for himself ASAP and keep you all updated!
hey guys,
im at the airport again *yawn* - an hour and a half before i am due to check in - *yawn*. anyway everything is going well, i have spoken to haixiao already this morning, and i will ring one of you guys soon with my remaining singapore currency and kindly qask you to spread the word that i am here and safe and ready for my flight. (not that i was ever in harm’s way here in
singapore)
last night i was sitting in the hotel lobby lounge, having a beer (bi jiao) before going to sleep, and there was a guy sitting near me having a smoke, so of course i took the opportunity to ask him if he could spare one (which of course he did). we then proceeded to talk about our different backgrounds (turns out he is an ethnic chinese who lived in malaysia until he was 18 and then spent 20 years in perth before moving to christmas island for the last few years or so). he was on business in singapore, he works in shipping (i sawsome bloody big boats in the harbour from the plane). anyway, we had a beer or two there and exchanged our stories blahblah. then he wanted to take me into a strange little club called ‘the purple bar’ that was located in the hotel, adjacent to the main front bar/lounge. he said there are some very nice chinese girls (not soliciting he assured me) who have come over and work there fulltime as singers at the hotel. the music was atrocious, (their voices were nice enough, but the backing music was very very poor).
anyway, i had my first real chance to talk chinese, the guy i had met is a fairly regular visitor to the hotel and he knew the singing girls quite well, (p.s. the girls get paid when customers ‘donate’ to them, they have no base salary). The internet session is running out of time here so i am going to have to finish up quickly now but any case I had a great night, only one of the girls spoke english and she taught me quite a bit of chinese, and I also learned some from the others and got to listen in on a lot oif the conversation. I was feeling a little poorly this morning but of course I was easily excited enough to jump out of bed and make the shuttle back to the airport from the hotel.
anyway i must run the session is ab out to finish
love you all,
will
hi, at singapore airport
they have free internet here so i thought i’d email, now i have to go and find the shuttle thingy to my hotel and also get enough currency for the night on the way
anyway,
love you all
bye
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