I am tired

What a day. It seemed simple enough, getting from Macau to somewhere to sleep in Zhuhai. I spent a few hours this morning in a business center in a casino hotel in Macau using the internet, the absolute only place I could find after spending a long time looking and talking to people. Apparently all the internet cafes have shut down for unknown reasons. So I found a youth hostel in Zhuhai which sounded appealing, with the potential to meet some new people since in Macau the hotel was nice enough but there weren't many opportunities for running into fellow travelers. I figured out the busride to the border, and then it is reasonably simple to walk across. There were hordes of people going through this process. First, you leave Macau and get your passport stamped, then move on through Chinese immigration and customs. There is a long building through which people pass on this journey. The only hold-up was Chinese immigration which had a line taking maybe half hour to get through, not too bad. On the other side, things got confusing, mostly because English is just gone. There are a few English signs on restaurants, but all the bus schedules were in Chinese only, and the information desk only spoke Chinese. I don't know what someone would do if they knew none at all. I know some and it required a reasonable amount of effort to figure out where to go. So I got on the bus, no English, no stop announcements, no nothing. I only had the English name of the hotel and the street. Turns out I am on the right bus, so that's good news. I get off on the street and spend some time walking up and down it before finally figuring out the numbers are going the wrong way. So I hop a cab and explain the destination, again all in Chinese, finally pulling it off and showing up at the Zhuhai Holiday Resort, which is as fancy as it sounds, though they have a special room with about 8 beds for cheap travelers. I got through the check-in also in Chinese, and made it to the room but the key didn't work. There were 3 people there who eventually explained that they don't give keys to the dorm because there is only one key. Apparently I need to ask somebody to let me in once I'm there. I'm going to figure that out soon. I was pretty much starving at this point, so I called this girl I met in Hong Kong who told me if I visited Zhuhai to call her, and she and her friend took me to a restaurant for dinner. They both spoke no English at all. So since I got here I have spoken no English. We managed to have a dinner conversation and I also managed to have a pretty decent vegetarian meal, so I am now full of tofu, vegetables, and rice. I made it back to the hotel and I'm now there typing this. The hotel staff also speaks a very, very limited amount of English. All the interactions are in Chinese. I'm definitely learning, but the jumping in the deep end to learn to swim analogy is accurate. Every time I hit a word I want to say but don't know in Chinese it is like running into a brick wall. I'm sure I will get more used to it, and I hope it doesn't sound too dramatic, but it can be kind of exhausting. It is not like learning Chinese in New York where I'm always going to fall back to English. There is no falling back here, I have to explain myself. The problem is if I don't explain myself it means I may not eat, or find my hotel, or get where I'm going. Let's say I'm learning a lot.

The dorm is pretty nice. Seems very clean and at the moment empty, so my journey to find this youth hostel at the moment hasn't turned up any other travelers with whom to chat, though at least getting here was an adventure unto itself. The rest of the hotel is very nice and the staff has been very helpful and pretty patient with my Chinese. It is kind of an amazing experience although at certain times it can be stressful. It'll be interesting to see how things go in the next few towns I visit. As far as my schedule goes, I don't really know. There are a few towns between here and Guangzhou, another big city. I'm going to go read my China book for a while and see what it says about moving around here and figure out what I want to do. One kind of remarkable thing is how the prices have dropped off immediately. My bed tonight in a room that at the moment I have to myself is 60RMB, which is about $8USD. The internet is going to cost about $1 for an hour and a half. The room is perfectly clean and nice, the bed is what seems to be the Chinese standard, a little on the hard side, but not too horrible. You wouldn't want to fall back on it. Zhuhai is unfortunately not all that walkable and I'm not up for a big night, though my friends invited me to go to a disco with them. I'll see how I feel. For 8 bucks maybe I'll spend one more night here and try to see some of the city before moving on, but it is a fairly large and spread out place which seems largely like a transitional city between HK, Macau, and the rest of China. It is technically a Special Administrative Area, with different rules from the rest of mainland. I just want to get to that other part and hopefully the super-westernized feeling that pervades the areas I've visited thus far will fade away a bit, though this is definitely already much less western than HK and Macau were.