Wuk in China

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