Back packing in China - indeed

We left the hostel yesterday and had a day to spend in Guangzhou. After travelling by metro (again, taxi's too 'expensive') and leaving our bags at the bus station we hopped on a metro again. I had checked on a map where one restaurant was located and we hopped on a metro again. As we didn't know the exact location we took a taxi and asked the driver to call to the restaurant. We got to kinow pretty quickly that the rest wasn't anywhere close by. Safely we arrived to this huge complex of a restaurant and hotel. The restaurant was full of tables and also small 'pools' for many kind of fish, raptiles, crabs and so on. It was more fancy place to what we are used to and we got annoyed by the five waitresses that were helping us - nobosy talked English so in the end there was only one woman really helping us. I ordered crab and girls just some more ordinary dishes. The lunch time was over by long time ago and I was still struggling with my crab. It took me an hour to eat it all as I am not experienced with other than normal Finnish crabs.

The getting away from the restaurant was interesting again. Chinese are helpful but not very logical always. They couldn't help finding the closest metro station and we ended up driving with a taxi again - to the furthest station in town. Quite a waste of money. Good thing is that we didn't need to sit and wait a long time in the long distance bus station in the evening.

The bus wasn't sleeping bus so we ended up 'sleeping' on the normal seats. We stopped for a few times and the bus driver was tryi9ng to get to know Tiina - in Chinese. Tiina's line was "emma ymmarra". After riding the bus for nearly 10 hours we were asked to get off for the ferry. So, there we waited on the deck, sitting on hard benches nearly for an hour before we even started moving. We don't always understand the Chinese way of being. Being tired, and expecting people to be quiet for a while they end up putting a dvd on and so loud that Tiina and Suvi ended up wearing earplugs.

The hostel we reached finally after 13 hours of travelling. The high point was arriving here with the taxi. We had a phone number (as always), he calls and tells he will take us to our accomodation. Then he parks in front of some hotel and says "sleeping". I lost my nerves and told him to call again to the number and take us to the correct place. He had no clue of the streets or of anything else. We have no lue how many extra turns he took and in the end we refused to pay him the whole price. So, that's how arrogant we are getting here - especially after not sleepin well.

Tiina and Suvi are watching Jackass movie 2. That's not something for me... Will go to bed soon and write later with better energy.

Erika