Oh The Places You'll Go: November 2013

Tuesday
I got yesterday morning around 10:30. Gross, I know. But I didn't go to bed till about 4 the night before so it wasn't really that bad. Apparently nobody woke us up that morning, because when I got out of bed no one was home. So we didn't have to teach yesterday, which was fine by me. I was exhausted! Since it was already almost lunchtime, we got ready real quick and walked down to kaiyin for lunch. In the cafeteria, we met up with brooke and hayden and ben and kim and decided to go check out the vangarde shopping plaza. Its basically like a big Walmart. There's a ton of good food for cheap. We found all these delicious chocolates that were only like 1 yuan each so we bought a few of those. And there were fresh, warm donuts for only 1 yuan(which if you do the math is only about 17 cents). I also found some cold cows milk!! It didn't taste exactly like the milk back at home but its the best I've found anywhere so far. Normally its either warm or soy milk, so this was a pretty exciting find!
That night i was in the mood for a christmas movie so we went over to hayden and brookes and watched home alone. I can't wait till christmas!! I miss christmas lights and cold weather and all the treats and smells...mmm :)) I love christmas time!

This vacation has been quite an adventure to say the least. It started out Thursday afternoon when we got to the airport. We were going through security and of course every single one of us ends up getting searched except for Brooke. Everything is clean up until they get to me and pull out a jar of peanut butter. They take it out and put it aside on their desk then send me through the rest of security. I was about to walk away when brooke runs over and grabs it back and asks the lady "Can I eat this all now??" She agreed and handed the jar to brooke in exchange for her plane ticket. Brooke ran over and we all started scraping peanut butter onto wherever we could find. Brittany had a jar of peanut butter that had a little room so we squished some in there. Then we remembered that melissa had a loaf of bread in her bag so everyone started piling peanut butter onto the pieces of bread. We ended up making three sandwiches out of an entire jar of peanut butter. Yes three sandwiches. They were about 3 inches thick...needless to say we had a hard time choking those things down.
The flight was awesome. It was so nice compared to all the long train rides we had on our other vacations. It was only about an hour long and I spent most of it reading on my phone.
We arrived to our hostel the first night around 8pm. After a little settling down in our hostel, we ate a late dinner at the dolphin bar. Real food. A spicy chicken wrap, french fries and ice water..mmm :) So good. Its funny how excited we get here over the simplest things like ice ha :) After dinner we went down and swam in the ocean for a bit..a little scary but so fun! The water is so nice. There aren't really any waves at the beach by our hostel because it's a bay, but there's supposed to be some on saturday and sunday because of the typhoon that's nearby. After our swim we decided to go back to the dolphin bar for a midnight snack(okay maybe it was a 1:30am snack haha) Then we headed back to our hostel and finally fell asleep around 3.
On Friday we went down to the beach and hung out there pretty much all day. It was the only day we were gunna get sun so we took advantage of it. We went swimming and built giant sand castles and played sand volleyball with a bunch of asians and russians and just relaxed. There's a lot of russians here in sanya, I didnt think that this was such a huge vacation spot for them. That night we had dinner at the dolphin bar again(last time I promise ha). Me and melissa split a burrito..a real mexican burrito. With cheese and salsa and beans and chicken and sour cream, all the good stuff. We ended the night with some 50cent ice cream cones from dicos. Not as good as mcdonalds ice cream cones but not bad.
Day 3 it was cloudy but gorgeous outside. Since there's a typhoon coming, we didn't get any sun all day, but it was still warm outside and the water was nice so it didn't make much of a difference. We played volleyball again and ate muslim noodles and these super yummy smoothies for lunch. (I guess the real name of the place is pulled noodles, but we just call it muslim because the people who own it wear little head wrap things and I'm pretty sure they're muslim ha) That night, we dug a huge hole in the sand and buried about 8 of us in it. A bunch of the chinese were crowding around us watching and then helping fill it in haha. It was so hard to get out of at the end but so fun :) We ate dinner that night at a super cheap dumpling place right next to our hostel. Cheap and delicious, always a good combination.
I know its probably weird, but I'm kind of excited for the typhoon haha! We got to experience the biggest typhoon to ever hit land!
Day 4: typhoon!!!!
We woke up this morning to the sound of pouring rain and loud wind. The typhoon had begun. It wasn't too strong yet so we decided to venture out and get some breakfast. We all ran out of the hostel into the rain and down the street. When we got to the main road, almost every store had closed because of the typhoon. We ended up eating at the dumpling place right next to out hostel since it was like one of the three places open that morning. After breakfast we decided to go down to the beach and check out the waves. So me melissa hayden and brittany put on our swimsuits and booked it down to the beach. The waves were huge compared to the day before! In fact there were practically no waves yesterday because it's a bay. The beach was blocked off with tape so we starting walking along the boardwalk to see if there were any parts open. Near the end we saw a few people out on the sand so we ran down to check it out. The waves were.pretty big It was so windy and rain was pelting our faces ha. We didnt want to waste a day on the beach so we went out and body surfed them..it was awesome! There was a lot of debri in the water and the current was strong so we didnt stay out too long or go out very far, but we didnt need to because the waves were huge even up close to the shore. It was so much fun swimming in the rain and riding the waves. After our swim, we spent the majority of the day inside the hostel playing games, watching movies or just talking and watching the storm. Our hostel owner chris wouldnt let us leave to go outside because it was dangerous and we kept using all his towels ha. We started getting ancy late in the afternoon though and the storm had died down a little so we decided to go explore and see the storm. We ran through the streets looking for open stores and checking out some of the damage..the wind was still super strong, melissa candice and hayden got completely blown over by it!!! It was crazy! We finally found a little supermarket that was open and bought some snacks to hold us over a while longer. Then we headed home and watched movies and played card games by candlelight because the power had gone out early in the afternoon. By 10 everyone was sick of snacks and wanted some hot food. The storm had died down some so we went and ate at muslim noodles and then walked down and checked out the beach damage. It was crazy, so much destruction and so much water. There were street signs bent in half, motorcycles knocked over and blown into the road, roof and house shingles all over, trees ripped out of the ground and on top of cars and buildings, windows broken and glass everywhere. Its impossible to capture it all, even on film.
Last day: Our flight was scheduled to leave at seven Monday morning... but they emailed us the night before and told us that due to the typhoon, it was delayed till 10am. So we woke up and headed down to the bus stop around seven in order to get to the airport two hours early. Well, we waited for almost and hour and still no bus. Then a little van pulls up and offers us a ride to the airport for twenty yuan each so we said yes and hopped in. It was a good thing we did because the streets were way flooded, it would've taken forever to get all the way to the airport in a bus. The streets were awful to drive through and with a bunch of stops and all the debri in the road, a bus would've been so long. Anyways, we get to the airport just in time to check in, go through security and get to our gate. We waited for an hour at the gate and then our flight disappears from the board. So we start talking to these asian girls and they said our flight got delayed again. Joy. So we headed upstairs to where where it was cooler and there was more space. We hung out near the flight departure board so we could keep checking to see if our flight got changed or if it was still delayed. After we talked to some people who had been waiting for flights from 7am the previous day, we realized that our flight was probably not leaving anytime soon. So everyone found a spot on the airport floor or on a bench and took a nap. We had like no food either because the typhoon had prevented any food trucks from reaching the airport. There were already hardly any restaurants in the airport and since the storm hit, there was near to none. And we were stuck there all day. Good thing we had a few leftover packages of crackers to hold us over. After a little nap, I went to go check the board to see our flights status. It still said delayed with no new estimated time of departure so I went back to my spot on the ground. Not ten minutes after I checked the board, hayden comes running over saying that our flight departed. No! There's no way it could have departed, i just checked and it didn't even say boarding or anything. We were freaking out. We ran over to the airlines service desk and tried to explain but they didn't understand much. We saw this guy right next to us with the same boarding pass, so we tried to talk to him but he spoke russian and very little so that was pretty much useless as well. Finally we saw the same chinese girls that were on our flight earlier..they had missed it too! So we went back out.to the check in counter with a group of 5 Russians, 3 asians, and 5 americans all trying to help each other (through some pretty broken english)and figure out what happened to our flight. Apparently it got canceled and no one even told us..the entire airport was in chaos so I guess its not that surprising. People were climbing all over the check in counters and behind the luggage conveyers..it was ridiculous. There were over two hundred flights cancelled the day before. Insane. We finally got new tickets for a sixoclock flight to guangzhou...and then it got delayed again. So sad. We found some cardboard boxes on the ground and spread them out to lay on. We're turning into real asians now. I honestly thought we werent gunna get out of the airport till 6am thr next morning. Everytime we got our hopes.up it just got delayed.and pushed back farther. Finally at 10pm the word boarding popped up on the screen. Ive never been so happy to.see that word in my life. We boarded the plane and made it to guangzhiu around 11pm. We were all starving when we landed so we ate at KFC and then caught the last bus at 11:40 to zhongshan. We didnt get home to our apartment until 3am. Longest day ever. It was fun but long vacation.