To finish this thing...

Its time to wrap this Southeast Asian saga up so we can move onto bigger and brighter things!

Well, you know how it is when you come home from a big holiday and you get the post-holiday blues so to speak...its back to the daily grind...back to earth...time to pick up the shovel...another day, another dollar -- wait a minute...that last done doesn't work so well in our situation...

I wouldn't say we have the post-holiday blues actually. It was kind of nice to have a 'rest' in our 'new' place when we got back. But to tell the truth, I'd have rather spent Chinese New Year almost anywhere but China. I will give you my top 10 reasons why:

*Its always the coldest week of the year. No matter if its in January or February, the coldest temperatures of the year will be hit that week. I don't know the science behind this, but its scarily true. Even if the few days leading up to it were 28, 29, 30 C, Chūn jíe will be below 10 C in Nanning.
*One never quite gets used to being woken from sleep at 3am to the sound of massive fireworks being let of within a metre of one's bedroom window (you know, the kind they use in pyro-technical shows -- they shoot metres into the air and then mushroom out -- spectacular in shows but not when your building is literally shaking from the boom...).
*The endless car alarms going off all the time due to the endless fireworks (why they bother to turn on their car alarms is beyond me).
*Its a family holiday. More so than Christmas is in the West. So any invitation you receive to someone else's dinner is more of a 'I feel sorry for you not having anywhere to go...but I really hope you say you've some other offer.'
*If you do go to someone's house, it can be awkward.
*And every dish consists of a dead animal.
*And they drink of copious amounts of bái jǐu -- the strongest liquor you can imagine -- you'll be gone after 3 shots. It tastes bad and Jason had weird dreams all night. I survived by concealing my water bottle in my lap, with the table cloth strategically placed so that I could smuggle my shot glass under the table to refill with water when no one was looking. I knew the consequences could be be bad but I was willing to risk it.
*NOTHING is open. I don't know how people stock up for the entire week considering we live in the land of tiny kitchens and even tinier fridges but everything is shut for at least four days and then only Wal-mart opens and its much the same feel as Wal-mart in the States the day after Thanksgiving...or as the Australians would say, as full as a beach dunny on boxing day. One has to be purely insane or starving to attempt Wal-mart during Chūn jíe.
*No restaurants are open. So if you're starving, your only option is to keep starving or go to Wal-mart.
*And then when things finally do open, everything is outrageously expensive because everyone's just taken a week off and spent their yearly savings on all the expensive food that is necessary to the Chinese New Year/Spring Festival diet.

And number 11 -- it lasts 15 days!

So suffice to say, I'm glad its over. With 15 days of not much to do, you'd think I'd have had more time to blog. But Jason's been working on the website before we hit the school books again and I've been...reading! English books! My sister's rough draft! Books in English! A feast of English literature! And when my husband isn't on the computer, even he has been reading! In fact, he read JR Tolkien's The Hobbit in a week! Its amazing what happens when books are actually readily available to one! Yes, perhaps one of the most deliriously wonderful things about our new location is the bookshelf in the living room...and the one in the bedroom...and the stack of recipe books in the kitchen...and the fact that there was an empty shelf in the spare room where we could put our measly six, tired but still our very own, books... Ah, to have a book collection or library of English books available to ones self again! The internet is grand and the fact that I can download Amazon's kindle programme to the ipod is cool too but reading a book from a computer? I don't know if I can ever get into that.

So let me finish with a little 'eventful trip home' story for you.

So we fly into Hong Kong, because that was the cheapest flight and Jason needed extra pages for his passport. Normally, you can fly into Hong Kong and hop on a ever-so-fun sleeper bus to Nanning the same day and since we arrived at 9am we thought our biggest problem would be finding a coffee shop to sit in for several hours till our bus departed. Ah, but the unseasoned Chūn jíe travelers that we are! There's no bus -- at least not from the Airport terminal. But we can try the China Travel Services Terminal. So we get Jason to the US Embassy first so he doesn't miss his appointment. All goes smoothly with that and we make it to the China Travel Services and...no bus. The girl explains to Jason, while I wait with the bags, that there's no bus until four days after Chūn jíe. So we regroup and think. Jason asks the girl, how about to Guangzhou? At least that's half way and usually Guangzhou has multiple buses to Nanning in a day whereas Hong Kong only has one.
But the girl says: "You can't go to Guangzhou."
Jason says, "Why not?"
The service girl, "Because that's not where you want to go."
It took a minute to convince her (the whole time he is speaking in Chinese with her) that the point was just to make it to China and we could get home from Guangzhou. Finally, she sold us tickets to Guangzhou.
We make it to Guangzhou but the bus doesn't drop us off at the bus terminal. No, it drops us off at the Marriot hotel so in we go lugging our back packs and looking like we've not slept in 2 days, because in actual reality, we haven't slept more than three consecutive hours at a time in the last two days and always in the sitting up position. Finally someone tells us where the bus terminal was and so we go and join the que of over half of China trying to make their pilgrimage home for Chūn jíe. Quite literally, over half of China. Ok well, maybe not all at the Guangzhou long distance bus terminal but Guangzhou is an industrial city, whose local residents are mostly made up of low income factory workers who've moved to the city from the village and all who have to make it home for Chūn jíe. There's no good reason to not go home for Chūn jíe. Even though bus tickets are twice the price, and you must bring gifts home that equal your years measly savings, if you've a job and there's air in your lungs, you must go home for Chūn jíe. So clutching our possessions for dear life and praying like mad there would be bus tickets (not really fancying a night in the bus terminal!) we muscle our way through the crowd to the foreign service desk. And joy! She has two seats left on the second to last bus that would be leaving in 30 minutes! At that point, I don't think I was ever happier to get on a sleeper bus.

We arrived home at about 7am, took showers, chilled out for a little bit and then threw our stuff in a truck to move to our new place. We slept very soundly that night...and then Chūn jíe started two days later...

And now, that we are finally back to our regular sleeping schedules, I'll let you get back to your regular reading schedules. I'm planning to start Wordless Wednesdays next week -- lets see how long I keep it up!

So until I get itchy feet again...or some money...whichever comes first!