This post may seem a bit whiny, but not every day can be full of fun and adventures. I'm here in China for three months (7+ weeks down and exactly one month to go) and so there are bound to be some bad days.
I've been at this hostel for two nights now and hardly slept a wink. It's very loud at night due to close proximity to bars and such. The hostel provides earplugs and they help, but I have trouble falling asleep and then get woken up periodically during the night. On top of this I've developed quite a bad toothache. I don't think there's a specific problem, other than - since I didn't take care of my teeth teeth properly when I was younger, they're extra sensitive now, and when I don't get enough sleep I also grind my teeth, and this makes my teeth more sensitive to just about everything. Let this be a lesson to all the young folks out there - take care of your teeth! Or else when you're my age, travelling for three months in China, you'll get a bad toothache in Kunming and then you'll regret your misspent youth of not flossing every night.
Breakfast this morning was ok - French toast and fruit salad. They seem to like French toast with jam here in China, although here they have the option of chocolate sauce, which I'll try next time. I wandered over to the Chinese school I arranged for Kunming, but the person I'd been emailing wasn't there, and no one else was aware of me. I left my number and email but haven't heard anything back yet. (It is now late in the afternoon.) I hung out at a Starbucks for awhile (my first visit to "星吧克" since landing in China) and had a Green Tea Latte (which was awful! - "抹茶拿铁" - the first two characters means Green Tea Powder, which is Japanese and awful - don't get this drink!) then went back to my hostel and had a nap.
In the afternoon I took my passport into the Foreign Affairs Office of the local police to get my Visa extended for an extra month (my original visa was only 60 days). I've heard that in Kunming this can be a bit bureaucratic, so I left lots of time, however it only took about 20 minutes to get through all the paperwork. Of course I now have to wait a whole week to get my passport back, with my new visa. I don't know what this means in terms of what I can do or not in the next week (for example if there are tours that need to see my passport), hopefully hopefully I won't have any issues.
Afterwards I was hungry so I stopped my the first restaurant I found for a late lunch. I ordered a kind of chicken noodle soup, and it was awful. The "chicken" was basically "chicken ends" with very little meat on the bones. I wasn't sure if they accidentally gave me the bones from the stock. And the noodles were too hot for my sore tooth. But I choked it down and then headed back to my hostel.
I'm now testing a scientific theory - I'm having problems with sleeping and with my teeth because I'm drinking too much beer and not enough gin & tonics. So far (I've finished one G&T and ordered my second - for science!) it seems to be working.
I hope my Kunming Chinese school calls. But in the meantime I'll teach myself some new words by doing more blogging in Chinese. And if I make more grammar mistakes than usual, you can just blame it on the gin & tonics!
干杯！ ("Gan bei!" This is how you toast in Chinese. It basically means "Bottoms up!")
No comments:
Post a Comment