Although interesting, my last nights in Guangzhou was not as good as my first one. I changed hotels to a international youth hostel located on the other side of town on this bar street along the perl river. There where a fue more tourist around there and you could even find people who understood a couple of words of English. Along with a group of Chinese tourists I went on this night time cruise boat along the river. The tall buildings had flashing neon lights and lasers on their roof tops that where reflecting in the black water. It was quite nice. Later i went to see what the pubs around the hostel where like. Most of them featured bar staff singing karaoke to cheesy Chinese pop song and to a fue international hits like the numa-numa song. The pub crowd was pretty into it, singing along and waving their heads and hands to the music. It was mildly amusing, but no really my scene. The beer in China is generally pretty weak, most beers are around 3.7 per cent, so you have to drink allot of it to get a buzz. That means you will be going to the toilet allot. Here is where it got weird, when I went to the toilet in the pub. While in the middle of taking a leak the toilet attendant put a hot steaming towel on my neck and started giving me a neck massage. A bit weird, but i guessed this was standard practice and acted like i did not mind. The Chinese must have a different sense of private space. Then all the sudden he twisted my head from one side to the other and my neck made these horribly load cracking sounds. That scared me a bit, as my neck has never made sounds like that. I said thank you, put some money in the tip tray and left. My head felt loose and i had a headache. Thanks, just what i needed, a broken neck. I decided to go to some other pub, have a couple of beer and forget about it. Another karaoke place, another couple of beers, another toilet, and again my head was being bent in ways it should not. I left and promised only to use the hotel toilet from there on.

The next day my head felt fine and i went to the train station to buy a ticket to Nanning. Its was pretty chaotic. Thousands (yes thousands) of Chinese where standing around waiting or queuing in different lines to get into the station. I could not make sense of it all, since all the text was in Chinese. I walked around a bit and saw a building with a sign that said ticket office. There was more queues in there. I picked a queue at random and managed to buy a regular seat ticket (but not a bed) on the overnight train to Nanning. Once i had the ticket i could use the train number to figure out where i should go. After some more queuing i managed to get into the railway station, get my bags x-rayed, get into the correct waiting room, and finally get myself on the train. It was very a long 12 hours with allot of out of the way stops, but it was not as bad or as crowded as i had feared. A coupe of times the people in the seats next to me tried talking words of English to me. Name? Where? Football? You could tell they did not understand my answers so I did allot of nodding and smiling instead. After one of these conversations one of them wanted to give me a bracelet. I said no thanks. I noticed he had a couple of animal tooth hanging from a string around his neck. I said "very nice" pointing at it. I shouldn't have, since he took it off and gave it to me. I tried to hand it back, but he would not have it. I think its custom around here, that if you say you like someones personal item they have to give it to you, and you have to give something back in return. The teeth probably had some personal value to him, maybe he had personally removed them from the jaws of his dead dog. I did not really like the teeth, i just said I did to be nice. Now I was stuck with the damn things, and had to find something to give him. I had a neckless of my own that i gave away. He took it but looked a bit disappointed like it had been a bad trade. He gave me his phone number and got another passenger to take some pictures off us. I found the whole thing a little embarrassing and tried to avoid any more contact by pretending to be asleep. Eventually i did fall a sleep and eventually the train arrived in Nanning. It was 5 in the morning but i managed to find a hotel next to the train station. I got a room and went to bed. Finally.

Cheers