I have been in Nanning about a day and think i have seen enough. I went looking for a pub but there does not seem to be any. People mostly just drink their beer at restaurants. The local food in Nanning and even in Guangzhou has been pretty bad (it was okay in Hong Kong). Especially the meat tastes bad. It seems they dont use spices and just boil the meet with lots of splintered bone in it. There are tons of buffe' styled food stalls around. You just point at what you want. But mostly the food is cold and nothing tastes of anything. Once you managed to spit the bones out, chewing does not help much and its better to just swallow the whole thing and get it over with. Well at least you are not hungry anymore. Some of these food stalls really stink as well. The kind of stink that lingers around butcher shops on a hot summer day. It makes you willing to go hungry a fue more hours. There are lots of KFCs an McDonalds around here but that is a bit like cheating. I'd rather just get used to the local food or loose some weight trying. The locals seem to like the food, so surely its not all bad. I think the food in Vietnam will be better though, as i heard they use lots of spices over there.

Tomorrow I'm going to take the train to the border town of Pinxiang, then I'll cross the Vietnamese border into Dong Dang, from where ill take the train to Hanoi. It should take me about a day. I never bothered getting a Vietnamese visa, as I heard that Scandinavians don't need one. I hope that is correct otherwise I'll have to backtrack all the way to Guangzhou to get my visa, only to return to the border again. I'd probably loose a week or more doing that. Hopefully everything works out and I'll be having a cold beer in Hanoi by the weekend. I'm hoping the food will be better, the beer cheaper, the people more laid back and the language barrier smaller. After that I'm looking to head south pretty quick to escape this cold weather. Lets see how it all works out.

Cheers