As some of you may know one of the reasons we decided to teach in China was to travel all around Asia during breaks. So we decided since we had 5 plus weeks off (turns out it was like 6... so we got to spend some time in good old Weifang) it was time for the great South East Asia tour.



After months of research, price checks and whatnot we finally decided on our route... the first leg of it was 2 different trains down to Shenzhen, the city on the other side of the harbor from Hong Kong.

All we brought for the entire month we were gone... turns out we could have gotten away with less stuff

Because we didn't book our train exactly 21 days before the trip (we waited till 20 days before), the one we wanted sold out and thus we had a bit of an adventurous train ride.

We rode one train 10 hours on a “soft sleeper”. This means it's a closed berth with only 4 beds instead of an open berth with 6 beds. I have to admit it was nice to close the door on the people staring at us.

However, one of the other 2 people in our berth decided that he would keep playing his cell phone game, as you can hear from the video it was pretty annoying and drove Chad crazy.


Anyway around 2am we rolled into the city of Fuyang. A city we never heard of before our train brought us there and that someone in our city said “be careful you can't trust Fuyang people”. Awesome.

We thought we would just camp out in the train station and sleep there for a while since our layover was only 10 hours (yay?). But after being stared at and watching someone hock a loogie right on the train station floor, we decided that maybe we could find a cheap hotel room for the remainder of the night.

One of the best decisions made on the trip, in my opinion.

After sleeping a bit we went to find food and explore the city. 

We were curious as to how functional this was...

Don't know if you can see it but that man on the far left is selling huge slabs of meat off his scooter... also... chickens!

Trying to hide my blonde hair so I draw just a bit less attention


Our train was like 45 minutes late... little did we know, this would be a theme of our trip

Because we are suckers, we ended up on the hard seats again for the second train ride... 24 hours of horrible hard seats. Chad made a friend though... he was super amped to see us get on the train and wanted to talk about Kobe Bryant for hours with us. He ended up giving Chad a rock that had the Superman symbol painted on it... and asked us odd questions about guns and "the gay".

Our Mentos variety pack seriously lacked variety - 2nd biggest disappointment of the trip
Anyway after a super rough 24 hours on a loud, bright, freezing train, and many hours spent plotting the deaths of random Chinese people who: 1. took up way too many seats for their size 2. snored incredibly loudly or 3. took an hour long phone call at 4am at the top of their lungs; we made it to Shenzhen. After dropping our bags off at our "hostel" (dude just rented the penthouse apt and tells the security person we're friends visiting) we went out to explore Shenzhen a bit.

Made it to Shenzhen

We read about somewhere called "Window to the World" where they have tons of landmarks from around the world, and wanted to check it out. Upon arrival we realized it would cost $30 a person to enter, so we just decided to take pictures outside and find a Uniqlo because Chad wanted new pants and I just love it so.



gotta get fixing that monorail - I'm pretty sure that his 'harness' is just two belts looped together


I was pretty over pictures at this point

I bet you could never guess that we have been awake for like 24 hours and unshowered for quite a few more

Panoramic view of the plaza... as you can see we weren't the only ones who showed up and didn't go in

After we both bought new pants ( I seriously can't shop for others without buying myself something, it's a terrible affliction) we decided to try out an Indian restaurant we passed. Another great decision... look at that feast!


Our "hostel" owner was pretty disappointed in us when we got back and told him we were going to dinner then going to bed... but after we explained the hard seat train ride he dealt with it- also he slept all day so there's that. I think we made it till like 9:30 before we fell asleep, and to me that is super impressive!

The next day we begun our cross over into Hong Kong and were greeted with THIS:



 Yeah... lucky for us some security guard pulled us out (Westerner privilege FTW) and we eventually got into a much shorter line. It was still pretty crazy, but it finally felt like we were on our vacation. 

Also, so you're not disappointed like we were... Hong Kong does not stamp your passport. They give you a lame piece of paper. HKFTL (that's Hong Kong For The Loss, for those of you who aren't hip on the line)