Here is the entry for our trip into Shenzhen, or mainland China. I am going to stop posting days because the next few days I can mush into on entry. Thanks for reading!
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So early Friday morning was our day to leave Hong Kong. And 7:30 a.m. we surely did leave. I really did enjoy that place and really want to come back some day. I don’t know what it was but I loved it there. Maybe it was the nostalgic factor of it feeling a bit like England. Oh well. All I know is that I going back. 🙂
So at 7:30 in the morning, we walked down to the light rail station and caught a train to Lo Wu, where the border crossing is. The Chinese town of Shenzhen was on the other side. When we got there we could definitely tell that we were leaving the comfort of modern China that is Hong Kong. The passport area was dark and dingy and in certain areas falling into disrepair.
We got through customs and headed down to where our bus was going to meet us. A funny thing that happened had to deal with the stair. Once leaving the Chinese side of the station, we noticed that there were no escalators. The stair had a smooth ramp in the middle of them that you could wheel your luggage down. One lady in group tried to walk down the ramp while guiding her luggage down, lost control and collided with another bunch of people in our group. We all had a good laugh from that.
We then walked to hotel where our bus was going to pick us up to take us to our hotel. Unfortunately they only brought one small bus with them. That was a problem because, while would have fit everyone in the group, our luggage wouldn’t have been able to fit on board. Jacob wasn’t very happy about that and asked them to send another bus.
Once the bus came we all got on board and headed for our hotel. That was our first experience with Chinese driving. The driver accidentally took us to the wrong hotel and in the process there were several parts where they were driving into oncoming traffic. It was good fun and it reminded me of the hectic driving of England.
We finally made it to the hotel. Jacob gave us our room keys in exchange for our passports which the hotel needed to scan. Jordan and I headed up to our room and were amazed. We were amazed at how nice the rooms were. Except for the faint smell of cigarette smoke, the room was quite fancy. We had touch controls for turning on the lights, a flat screen TV and two queen sized beds. It was really nice. Oh, and there was a western toilet. 🙂
Of note, the showers that we have had here in China have been amazing. The shower that we had at the hotel had one of those massive ‘rain’ style shower heads and was consistently warm. Both the showers in Hong Kong and Shenzhen had great water pressure as well.
Later that day we all meet up for our TESOL training in the hotel conference room.