day 18 - Last night in China - 03.09

At the bus transfer van we met one German guy who works in Xiamen. He was going to get his new visa from Guangzhou so was going to the bus station as well. He was very talkative and we had quite entertaining hour with him :) He was so vividly explaining his experiences with this snorting and spitting here - that more than once it has happened so that there is this horrible noise coming from behind him when he is walking on the street and he just growls at the thought of a person who would do such a thing, when he looks over his shoulder to take a look at the monster who can make such noises he would find some tiny lady on high heels walking behind him :) But the way he was describing the situation was hilarious, i laughed so hard that i got tears in my eyes :)

I did not even catch the German guy's name, but we got some interesting discussions in about the ways that locals socialize and spend their free time, of how the holidays are handled here and what they consider entertaining. We also talked about the health care system and education system here - it was good information. And oh the guy was cheerful, most of the time we were laughing so hard that we got tears in our eyes. So that dude was very lively and positive, he has worked here for a year and a half already and was having conversations with the locals quite freely already in Chinese. He also gave us some good hints about arriving to Shenzhen and crossing the border as well as getting to Hong Kong from there. Very useful bits and pieces of information.

All of the sudden we came to a realization with Riina that this is the last night for us in China! We will be crossing the border and leaving China in the morning and later we will take a plane directly from Hong Kong to Vietnam. There will be different money even in Hong Kong and we realized it just at the bus station that we hadn't exchanged any Hong Kong dollars! Uh oh, we will figure it out somehow.

Last night ended up being a bumpy ride :) Seriously it seemed like the bus driver was driving on the side of the road (so on the field) or something. I had hard time sleeping in a bed that was rocking and jumping that heavily. So I did not get any sleep :( We arrived to Shenzhen 2,5 hours in advance.