So now I'm in mainland China! It's very different from Hong Kong; different clothes, hair, cigarettes..... Succumbed to temptation today and bought a pre-Chen Village packet of fags. I'd been eyeing them up all the time I was in Hong Kong and today I just decided I wanted a smoke. I really like those countries where you can buy a single cigarette. How brilliant is that?! I can't say I even enjoyed the one I smoked today so most of them will probably go to the bin...
Anyway, that wasn't what I wanted to write about! I had thought to go pretty much straight to the Chen Village from Hong Kong, but eventually decided it might be nice to to spend Christmas in Guangzhou in the south. I found a clean-sounding hostel on hostelworld.com (a website I'd highly recommend) and arrived this afternoon. I'm staying in the dorm. Dorms are usually good places to meet other travellers and have some interesting chats, but this dorm is TOTALLY SILENT! Two girls are texting on their mobiles. The guy has been caressing his Apple Mac all day, and I am no better tapping away at this blog. When I arrived this afternoon, the only other guest was working on two laptops, and the staff were watching Desperate Housewives on another. The two Brits who arrived this afternoon reached straight for their notebook to book their next guesthouse. Travelling didn't used to be like this! People used to chat and share ideas verbally with the people in the room with them!
I'm just as bad as the next person. While in Hong Kong I bought, among many other things, a new mini-notebook and a lovely Nokia smartphone, both of which I adore. I'd forgotten how much fun downloading is, and in less than a week I've got three and a half films, two TV series, and about 20 albums. It's fun but curiously addictive; I can't have the computer on without it downloading something or I'm just wasting the internet connection. It takes a lot of time and before you know it you've spent hours online looking for free software to convert FLAC files (what the hell are they?!) to MP3s. And that's the thing. You get hooked by your glossy black toys. You buy the notebook because you want to have your own internet access, then you spend days obsessing over the speed of your downloads and keeping Windows Media Player tidy. You come to China and realise you can't access Facebook or Youtube and are so horrified that you immediately go online to investigate ways to get around the Great Firewall (and successfully too, thank God!).
Well anyway, I really don't have anything interesting to say. Neither do my fellow dormers (is that a word?) so I think it might be time to watch a movie in bed. The Adventures of Tin Tin, Sherlock Holmes or Super 8........?
