Day 30 - A Good Picture

This story actually happened the day before but I forgot about it and it's just too good to pass up. Me and Dave were walking in front of the KFC I which I took a picture of for the previous post when a women with selling pineapples came up to me. She had on one of those round and pointy hats that is traditionally associated with Vietnam. She had a long stick over one shoulder with a basket tied to each end when the pineapples she was selling were. She put the stick on my shoulder so that I could take a picture with it. Now I didn't really ask for this and I knew she was going to charge me for it but what the hell I thought it will make a good picture. As she was putting the pineapple holding stick on my arm another one of these pineapple women ran up to me and put another stick on my other arm and the hat on my head. Now these things are actually quite heavy so I had Dave take a picture quick before I gave it back. She said she wanted 100,000 dong which was way too much but I was in a good mood so I eventually agreed to give 50,000 to each of the women, I think they gave me some pineapple too. Now I had just recently gone to the ATM so the smallest bill I had was a 200,000. I gave it to the woman who pulled out a 100,000 as if she was going to give it back to me then handed it to the other woman and they ran off. Now these things they had on their shoulder were pretty heavy but they still managed to run pretty damn fast. I was also just so stunned by seeing these two little women race away with their pineapples in toe that I didn't do much. I was pretty pissed for the rest of the day but that is by far the oddest way I've ever been ripped off.

In the morning I had arranged for a cab to the airport and even though I was paranoid that I was going to get ripped off it was fine. The airport was pretty small and I actually had trouble finding somewhere to exchange my last Vietnamese currency. The flight was in two parts with the first stopping at Guangzhou. Guangzhou is a city really close to Hong Kong in one of the first areas of China to benefit from their embrace of capitalism. The airport there was huge and it took me about an hour to find the place where I had to get the boarding pass for the second leg of my flight then get back to my gate. The people traveling were mostly Chinese but decidedly on the upper class end of the spectrum. In fact almost everyone in the airport was sporting a lot nicer stuff than I was. Both flights were uneventful and I arrived in Shanghai on time. I arrived though in the smaller airport so it took forever to find where I needed to go to get the bus to the train station. I needed to call Steve in the end and have him talk to one of the people there who showed me what bus to get on. The bus was really slow and it took more than an hour to get to the train station. I got a ticket for the next train, which was a few hours off and just sat around for a while. Finally I got on the train and made it back to Changzhou with no problems.

The whole trip was a really amazing experience. Going from the frigid North of Harbin to the tropical climate of Ho Chi Minh City. I traveled through some really interesting places and meet some really nice people, and only got ripped off about three times. I've been trying to think what will stick with me the most and I think that it will be waking up on the overnight bus and looking out my window and seeing the sun just coming up in one of the most beautiful valleys I've ever seen. I was awake really late one night here recently and I saw the sun come up, or more accurately I didn't. I saw it go from dark, to grey, to sickly grey, to sort of white, to bright white and finally at around noon I saw the sun emerge out of the haze over head. It was nice to spend some time in a place with some much natural beauty and so much less pollution.