Guilin cont'd

My friends from Sognyuan arrived in Guilin later on my second day, so the one from the States went to teach at night again and the Songyuan crew went out to get rowdy. We met a group of foreigners that are on a brief study abroad program in Guilin and hung out with them for a bit. They made us feel really old; they're all like 19, but they took us to a club and we had a great time (though I think they did ditch us there... lol).

One pretty funny thing happened that night, I was talking to a Chinese guy in the club and he poked my arm. I wasn't sure why, but I was said, "Yeah, it's kind of fat." (I've had Chinese tell me this before.) Then he pinched my stomach and said, "No, all fat." What?! It just made me laugh. I'm not sure what his purpose in saying that was, and I'm by no means fat, but that's China! They look down on being fat and such, but they talk about stuff like that very matter of factly (also, things like, "You have a pimple").

The last day I woke up and had breakfast with the Songyuan crew and then it was time to be on my way back home, which turned out to be quite an adventure in itself. I had tried to book a taxi to the airport the day before with my hostel; I knew I wasn't going to want to screw around with taxis to buses to shuttles or whatever the longer but cheaper option would be. The airport is less than an hour from the city by taxi. When we got back late the last night, the hostel told me I didn't need to book in advance, I'd be fine just coming to the desk whenever I want to leave. Soooo, that's what I did. Or tried to do.

The front desk called the taxi company in the morning and couldn't get through, the girl said it was really hard to get a taxi that day. Apparently the legit taxi drivers complained about the "black taxis" (people that are not legal taxis but still drive people for money and often scam them), so the government was checking all taxi drivers' papers that morning. She gave me some ridiculously complicated directions of a bus to take to another hotel to an airport shuttle. It wasn't clear at all, but I had given myself a little over an hour to get to the airport, but it seemed that she hadn't tried very hard to get me a taxi, so I decided to try myself.

I walked down to a major street and waited on the corner in front of a major hotel. For ten minutes. And saw not one taxi. In the days prior there was a constant flow of them there. Time was starting to get short, so I called the front desk and asked for directions to the bus again. Completely incomprehensible, again.

I was trying to figure out what to do, when a man that I had seen around the hostel who seemed to be Italian and possibly opening a restaurant next door walked by. After a long conversation with him and the concierge from yet another hotel, I discovered that all of the taxi drivers were on strike. We determined that the Italian's Chinese friend would drive me to the airport shuttle whenever he could come to meet us. I had pretty much given up on making my flights at that point.

The guy eventually showed up and we got to the shuttle stop just as the shuttle was pulling away, so we followed it with all the windows down and the Chinese man, the Italian man, his Italian mother and myself hanging out the windows yelling for them to pull over. Naturally, all they did was wave.

I ended up taking the next shuttle, which left for the airport less than an hour before my flight was supposed to leave. I got there exactly when my flight should have taken off, but luckily it was delayed long enough for me to check my bag and walk right on. My second flight was on time, but I still had enough time to collect my baggage in Beijing, bring it to another terminal and check it, and myself, in for the second flight. What an ordeal.