Caught the express train to Guangzhou, big city up in mainland china. China is a lot trickier to get into than hong kong, mainly due to the lack of english. On my arrival card it said "alien immigration form". When going through customs, there were two lines in english, one for chinese and one for chinese foreigners. How can you be both chinese and foreign to china? Thankfully there were a lot of angry looking guards that kept prodding me in the right direction.
I didn't know anything about the city bar a quick squiz at a map on google the night before. My trusty lonely planet book had nothing apart from how to catch the train there, so it was no wonder i got lost pretty damn fast. In hong kong everything was written in english/chinese, Macau portuguese/chinese, but Guangzhou was just chinese for everything so i couldnt even speculate at what the signs said. Noone spoke any english. Determined, i asked a taxi driver to take me to a hotel. He pointed at a mountain. The next taxi driver had an infected neck twice the size of his head. After asking he just exhaled heavily so i muttered ok and ran away, fast.
Lost and hungry i came across something familiar, KFC. Glad to be involving myself in something western i tried to order a chicken burger, but again no english signs. God damn it. Realised i had no money in Yuan (Chinese currency - hong kong, macau and china all have different money!) with no money exchangers in sight, so i withdrew Y300 from a bank. Still had no idea how much money that was.
After hours of wandering around I caught a bus, hoping it would take me somewhere catering for aliens like me. Thankfully it did, otherwise i would have been in the shit. Ended up at the pearl river, which is where i wanted to be and found myself a nice little hostel to curl up in for the night.
