Two Hasaam In As Many Days. Woah.

Day #64
Funds: $5500
Michael has replaced numerous vices with gross over-consumption of peanuts, and regrets nothing. Except for that one that was completely empty. I am NOT getting over that anytime soon.

Hmmm lessee here ... ok we'll do it this way: a 3in1 package for your reading pleasure!

[Trip to Zhu Jia Jiao]

(___________ = 15km, apparently)

So me and Joy decided to stick with the SISU Guesthouse until the 10th cos with the student discount things weren't so bad, and anyway I'd paid for the internet all of January so it would have been silly to walk away. (Then of course as I'm sure you're well aware by now my laptop died nice and proper within 2 days.) We could have easily spent all the time hanging out watching movies or whatever but - oh yeah, the disc drive had morphed into a smart-arse. So we decided we should do something touristy, originally we were thinking Su Zhou, but then Joy remembered some place she'd been when she was little which she assured me was very pretty, and I'd already been to Su Zhou last time I was here, so we went to this other place slightly closer instead. Pretty standard "Picturesque Chinese Tourist Site" meaning lots of photo ops and people trying to sell you reeeeeeeeally souvenir-type goods which might have made good presents if I could have been bothered stopping to really look at them properly. Sorry guys ^^" We rode on a boat and Joy took a couple videos which hopefully we'll find a way to put up somehow, including one or two of Crazy Turtle Lady, who we bought Presumably Sane If Possibly Traumatised Turtles from. Hmmm I could have said all that better huh? Well anyway yes, that was the bottom line. We have turtles now, terrapins if you wanna get anal about it. They are called Red-Eared Sliders (although we call them Bowser and Eddy) are very cute, and surprisingly lively at completely sporadic intervals. They are also, it turns out, so extremely illegal in Australia that if you are caught with them, you cop a $100,000 fine and/or 5 years jail time. So sorry Cameron, I did originally plan to sneak you one home but I'm thinking it's not really worth the trouble ^^" The plan now is to have Joy's Ah Gong (maternal Grandfather) adopt them and we'll visit them when we can.

So Crazy Turtle Lady did explain in great detail how lots of people get away with smuggling her turtles, she was in fact quite manic about the whole thing and all but threw her turtles at us. She insisted we never feed them or put them in very deep water until it gets warmer. I'm not really doing her justice, which is a shame because she had NOTHING on Insane Lizard Man, a merchant with similar wares and a similar sales pitch, only he was insisting we hide the tiny things in our mouths when we walked through. He demonstrated this once or twice. When it became apparent that we were quite happy with the turtles we'd already purchased he then asked us how we felt about "long", which I thought meant "dragon", and so did Joy. Next thing I know he's reached into a hidden bag, pulled this sinister-looking lizard out and thrown it on my scarf. Man that thing was awesome, could crawl upside-down on my arms and everything. They looked fast and pointy, so overall a sort of cross between Sonic the Hedgehog and Spiderman, I think. Awesome. Oh yeah and Zhu Jia Jiao is famous for its rice dumplings (sticky rice mixed with stuff molded into a triangular prism-shape and wrapped in a leaf of some sort). They have lots of different kinds, some with meat, eggs, red bean, pretty much everything. All the ones I sampled were pretty good. =D

[Brief Rundown of Booktown!]
THIS is a bookstore. The sign reads "Shanghai Shu Cheng" or "Shanghai Book City", Fuzhou Road has a couple little ones here and there, then suddenly here it is. The place is 7 floors, each floor specialising in a category or theme and in my opinion, this is something we could really do with back home. I mean, what have we got, a 2-storey Angus and Robertson? Is it A&R again or some other place that has the mini-Gloria Jeans sometimes? This place has an actual proper Starbucks somewhere in it (not that I'm saying we need Starbucks in Melbourne, I was quite proud of us for holding that off as well as we did). They also sell a huge variety of clearly burned PC games, probably legit CDs and a few nifty little gizmos as well as DVDs. But ... unlike some uhh, OTHER book places I may have encountered it doesn't allow itself to become a Timezone clone, hehe. Ohhh and this random pair of adorable Chinese girls came up to me and Joy and asked us if we could sign a book filled with random messages they were compiling from strangers as a birthday present for their friend. We thought this was a really cute idea, hope it wasn't some sort of scam, ahah. They'd gotten a few people to write in their native tongues so I figured rather than bastardise the birthday girl's native tongue I'd just write a heartfelt mini-essay about how crazy I thought her friends were. When I asked what their friend's name was, they said "Rabbit". AWWWWWW.


[The Impromptu Trip To Nanjing]

(___________ = 100km)

On the 10th Joy had to leave Shanghai to go see her Dad's side of the family, who live someplace whose name I forgot but is close-ish to Qingdao, I think. At any rate she wanted to go it alone, I think because she doesn't know them as well as her maternal Grandparents so bringing me might have been weirder. That ultimately suited me just fine as it gave me these 5 days to be alone and do pretty much nothing, something I haven't been able to do for quite a while. Can't remember if I mentioned it or not, but Thursday I'll get on a plane to Qingdao and she'll meet me there in the afternoon. So we got up relatively early to catch a taxi to her uncle's place, he was supposed to see her off at Shanghai Railway Station and saw no harm in me coming along too. The place was packed, apparently lots of people are flooding the long-distance trains as Chinese New Year is coming up and everyone wants to go back to their hometowns to be with their families and everything, it's basically Christmas and New Years rolled into one. So the place was busier than anywhere I've ever seen, and that includes my stint in HK (come to think of it, HK's probably even worse right now ... hmmm). Joy's Uncle kept trying to get something called "Platform Tickets", which for all I know could be the done thing everywhere else too but the point is you need to get em if you wanna accompany somebody all the way to the train itself. They wouldn't sell them to him. Then he sent me and Joy there to act like I was a lost foreigner who needed my Chinese friend's help to find the right train. That didn't work either. So at this stage I wasn't sure what was going on, I just knew that Joy was getting scared she was going to miss her train, and considering the time of year another ticket might be tricky. Joy's Uncle disappeared and this time promptly returned with a man in a leather jacket. We were fairly sure they'd never met before and suspected he'd been slipped a bit of cash or something. Next thing I knew we were following this guy through the train station acting natural and nobody was trying to stop us. I had no idea why. Joy asked her Uncle, "who is this guy?" he just laughed and said "it doesn't matter!" and I laughed too =P "See, Joy? This is the way to get things done!" I chuckled, and probably went off on some sort of rant about how clever and resourceful her Uncle was if memory serves.
We found Joy's train with 15mins to go, and the three of us hopped on, me and her Uncle carrying her luggage. We had a quick look around to figure out where to put everything down and ... well by now you've probably guessed that at this point the doors slammed shut and the train started to move 10mins early. A train lady walked past and Joy's Uncle explained that we didn't have tickets and needed to get off. She politely explained that the train wouldn't stop until the next station, and since this was an express that would be Nanjing. In two hours (as seen in the above map). Joy's Uncle tried to be outraged but then she also politely pointed out that there was no such thing as an express train platform ticket, so it made no sense that we should have even been there. I tried to contain my excitement since after all, for him this was a massive inconvenience whereas for me, I was going to Nanjing! I would see a bit more of China after all! I wondered if it would be possible for me to sneak off, crash at a hostel for a little bit and return to Shangy in a couple of days but then it occurred to me that given the whole Chinese New Year crazy train situation, I couldn't be sure that tickets back would be easy enough to come by and/or affordable. Oh and all my luggage was waiting for me in the lobby of SISU Guesthouse, not sure what they would do with it after a couple days of me not coming to pick it up, so I gave that plan a miss. [Sigh] It would have been awesome though. I did get some nice pictures of Chinese countryside for a change though, as well as some not-so-nice pictures of some demolished houses or some sort of rubble. Perhaps I will show them to you all some day, when I have access to a computer that doesn't have facebook issues. For the moment, they sit on my nifty USB stick. Oh and I have a picture of a sign that says "Nanjing Station"!!! That PROVES I was in Nanjing! Sadly, we didn't even leave the platform, our train going back was already there for us. In case the map doesn't put it into perspective, this is probably the same as accidentally getting on the wrong train at Spencer Street Station (oh, I'm sorry, "Southern Cross" Station) finding yourself in Sydney, and then just coming straight home.

Phew, okay so I think I've covered most eventy-type goodness, at least I got all the Joy-content done for the moment, things have been kinda slow since she left so look forward to a relatively shorter entry about the last couple of days! Ahh who am I kidding, Japan stuff and arrangements have advanced, I'll probably wind up going on some sort of rant about my money situation, exchange rates and how I look forward to going like nothing else. Oh well, you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't enjoy it, right? I mean, it's not like I'm putting a gun to anyone's head, am I???