Zhou Dynasty

I just got back from visiting Amanda's family in Guangdong province. They live in a small city called Lianjiang and it was not easy getting there. At 9am we started this journey by taking a cab to the Shanghai MagLev station, the maglev took us to the airport, the plane took us to Haikou where we got on a boat, the boat took us to another city called Haian which we were picked up by another car, drove for over 2 hours and finally got to her house at 8pm. Almost 12 hours on the road for traveling the distance of Minneapolis to Seatle. During my entire stay in Lianjiang (4 days, 3 nights), I drank Chinese liquor during breakfast, lunch and dinner. I've never drank so much weird tasting strong liquor (25%~55%) in my life. I drank stuff ranging from cloudy rice liquor in what looks like a plastic gasoline container to the prestigious Hennesy XO and China's famous Wu Liang Yi. If you haven't tried Chinese liquor before, I suggest you don't. It will take a lot of shots for you to "acquire the taste." Here are some pictures and interesting things I saw along the way. The MagLev's top speed is half the speed of an airplane I heard. When I looked out the window I felt like I was superman flying really fast over all the cars below. The weather in the Hainan province was hot, it was in the 70s everyday. Interesting thing to note is that the airport in Haikou makes you feel like you've landed in Hawaii but as soon as you leave the airport, you quickly realize that it is probably the only paradise you'll find in the city. The boat ride was weird. You didn't feel like you were on a boat because the seating resembled the ones on the airplanes. There were two TVs in the front showing some movie and there was a guy doing weird sock demonstrations and then trying to sell the socks. The boat ride on the way back was much much worse. It was dark, dirty and crowded with college students, I felt like I was being smuggled into the US or something. Guangdong people are crazy about their chickens, they love this one dish where the chicken isn't thoroughly cooked so you still see some blood from the marrow. Mmmm... H5N1 anyone? I saw a long line of these trucks carrying tons of sugar cane queued for the sugar processing plant. The line was probably a mile long. The people who operate these loud and slow moving tractor vehicles on the highway are nuts. I don't see any seatbelts but I bet this thing has one of those state-of-the-art safety features where the passengers suddenly get wrapped up in bubble wrap if a collision were to occur. Our car needed a quick tune-up so we stopped at a road-side shop. The mechanics here must be really good because they sure start out learning at a young age. I think this picture shows that the airport advertisements of beach-side resorts is all just a big fat ... couple blocks away! I met the 3 little pigs on another rest stop. Wow I didn't know they have a KFC here too! Wait a minute... MFC??? It's like fried chicken but not from Kentucky! Forget MFC, we went to the Nice Restaurant. Their food was pretty nice and so was the service. Overall, the restaurant was pretty nice. Now that's fresh chicken! If you want to avoid the H5N1 all you gotta do is keep your own live chickens and make sure they're not dead when you cook them. These bamboo water bongs are so popular in the Guangdong province, they're everywhere. They can be found in restaurants, offices, dirty street food stands, and homes. I had some trouble getting it to work right, I'm just not the expert when it comes to these bamboo water bongs.