We left for Sanya Sunday night. We were so excited! Although it’s only been a month of teaching so far, this vacation is needed. I think that since we started the year off so disorganized we were all a little bit frazzled. It didn’t help that we went away last weekend and then my grade 11’s were heading into essay week, so I had a ton of marking on my plate. The week was so crazy it was nice to jump on a plane to paradise.
When we first got to Sanya we didn’t think that we could still possibly be in China. This place is absolutely gorgeous. The water is beautiful, there are palm trees everywhere and more people try to speak English to you. There is a very large Russian tourist population as well. We noticed our first night out that some of the shop vendors weren’t speaking mandarin to us, they were trying to speak Russian to us…thoughtful, but still doesn’t help us.
We spent the first day at the pool. Well I stayed out on the beach for a bit. I finished my book and laid out in the sun just as I had dreamed for the last few days. The only thing that made this a little less peaceful were the beach vendors walking back and forth every five minutes asking you to buy fruits, pearls, or go on their motor cycles. I walked along the beach and found some really fun shells to make necklaces out of as well. Once I was done at the beach I joined the other two girls at the pool. They had spent this whole time on floaties in the pool, without sunscreen….and these girls don’t bode well with the sun like I do. I even got a tad burnt, so you can imagine the sight of them at the end of the first day. Robyn wasn’t too bad but Amanda does resemble a crustacean. At night we headed to a market in town where we ate dinner and did some shopping. There are tons of Hawaiian type gear here. It’s too funny. All the men here are wearing matching Hawaiian shirts and shorts. It was a pretty mellow night as the girls were feeling the burn, and we were all tired from spending the day in the sun.
The next day we headed to the pool yet again. We had sunscreen today, but the girls were still a little toasty. We bought some floaties the night before so we had a great time hanging out in the pool again. I started another book which makes me so happy. It’s nice just to lay back and have some me time. It’s been a pretty heavy trip though. Having all of this time off really gets your mind wandering as to what is happening back home. All we have been talking about this trip is planning for our next trip in January, and what it’s going to be like when we finally get home. The time has passed quickly, but it’s still a long haul until we’re home.
That night we went out for dinner with Darrel and Margaret (the principal and his wife who teaches at the school), along with our dep. Head Cassie, and Lindsay and Mandy, two other girls from the school. We ate at a western food restaurant called Fat Daddy’s. It’s always nice when you have a change. Dinner was great, but the adventure to the restaurant was a little much. Darrell had the address to the restaurant and the taxi ended up dropping us off in a totally different area of town. We tried to ask some of the rickshaw guys to guide us to where we were going and they said they would take us there….well they took us to a place to eat, I think where their friends owned the restaurant. That was the first time we had taken one of those…that was quite the adventure and experience. We then asked around and tried to find someone who knew the restaurant we were trying to go to. The taxi then took us to yet another restaurant…We were all getting a little frustrated at this point. The girls we were meeting were already at the restaurant so they asked the owner to walk over to the landmark that we were at and walk us over to where we needed to be. It was so nice of them to do that. It was so hard to find because his sign had been blown away during a typhoon.
Today we did some shopping. We got a lot of fun little gifts for people and did some great bartering. We’ve learned that you should only pay what you want to pay, eventually they will give in. Also, if we want to get the same sort of thing we can get an even better deal by buying it all together. It’s pretty funny how they think we’re stupid. They always start off the price at least double what we end up paying. We had a late lunch, and now we’re back at the hotel taking a little cat nap. Amanda’s burn is still really bad and robyn had a little bit of a rough night out. She was pretty entertaining though. My favourite tid bit of the night was a little bit after we home. Amanda and I were up talking and robyn had ko’d on the bed. All of the sudden, she gets up and takes the little sashes off the end of the bed.
I asked her, “what are you going to do with those?”
she replies, “bathroom!”
I say, “What are you going to do with those in the bathroom?”
She then replied yet again, “bathroom”
Lol, then she comes right out of the bathroom and strips out of her dress and falls asleep again….Amanda and I cannot contain our laughter. I was very curious so I get up to go to the bathroom to see what she did with them. All she had done is sprawl them on the floor…hehe, so random.
So far this trip has been awesome. I am so glad that we chose to come here. It was a pretty spur of the moment decision, but it’s exactly what I needed. Tomorrow we’re going to head to the hot springs. Darrell and Margaret went and said they were pretty amazing. Tonight will probably be a low key night as well. I’ll update once we are back in Wuhan :S.
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