Hooey in Asia

We arrive in Wuhan and discover that, at least near the train station, Wuhan is a pretty dirty and crowded place. There are literally hundreds of buses and tens of thousands of people all cramped in city streets with half-destroyed buildings. There is dust floating everywhere, and with the added humidity, it's extremely hard to breathe. From what we can see, Wuhan looks pretty remote, but it's still inhabited by several million people.

Today is the day my battery-powered hand-fan decides to break, but it's made in China, so maybe I can find another one soon.

We took a taxi to the other train station that serves the line to Yichang, which cost about $10 total for an hour of driving through crazy traffic. The taxi lady was a really good driver, and thought since we could mangle some sentences from a phrasebook, that surely we understood Mandarin spoken quickly.

Near the train station we bought a cardboard box, much to the confusion of the store owners who weren't really in the box-selling business. We also bought some scissors and tape. If you think we got these supplies to make book protectors, then you're right. It turns out these book protectors are pretty good at keeping the books in mint condition, and are easy to holster and unholster. Brad wanted one so bad we bought the supplies, so to those of you who said it was a retarded idea, you can lick my ass. =)

When we got to Yichang, we managed to score a two-star hotel for $8 CDN each for the night, which had what we thought was a huge bathroom. Turns out there isn't really a shower, but just a shower head in the main bathroom. So you just shower in the room itself, and water goes everywhere. It was a pretty weird setup.

After dropping our stuff at the hotel, we went to a local street meet place in an alley nearby. We seemed to be the only foreigners in Yichang at the time, and walking down the alley felt like we were the first to encounter a remote civilization. There were several vendors cooking all sorts of great stuff, and the vendors' children running around having fun. The sense we got from this place was that although these people had next to nothing, they were happy working and living close to their children and relatives. The children were very cute and funny. [Come back later for some photos and videos]

We met a girl called Rita who wanted to practice her English while talking to us. Her sister owns a restaurant and we had some street meat at their little night stand. Rita wants to be a travel agent, and is still in school. We talked about the differences between Canada and China, and Canada and the US. We also briefed her on the differences between family values and sense of independence between Canada and China, which was pretty interesting. She was also confused as to how Brad could be half Chinese and not know Chinese. That keeps coming up it seems.