Day 15: Guilin to Nanjing

Wow, today was a tough day. The day started off with the rain just pouring down on Guilin. Roads quickly flooded and made for bad traffic. The rain also limited what we were able to do today with the tour group. The morning was spent going to stores, random shopping, and lots of sitting on the bus. We had free foot baths and massages before we headed to the airport. It was kind of awkward because I didn't speak much Chinese and the guy massaging my feet didn't speak any English and soon lost any interest in trying to communicate. He looked a couple years older than me and most of the people there looked like they hated their jobs. I felt bad for them all because they just looked so sad. Afterwards, we headed for the airport. Man was the traffic bad! The one road towards the airport was so congested that it took us an hour to probably move a quarter of a mile. The road was a flooded about 2 feet in some parts and all the little cars would try and drive through and then their cars would fail, adding to the congestion. Many of the buses just got stuck in their positions that the passengers just got tired of waiting and got off the bus and waded through the water. Water was running of the mountain at such a quick pace and even sewers were full and overflowing. I saw a house that was flooded, and lots of people knee deep in water.

We finally made it to the airport after about two hours, which is unfortunate for our tour group because they missed their flight. We made our flight to Nanjing though, but the flight was miserable with bad food and bad service. When we got to Nanjing, we had a lot of trouble finding out how to get to our hostel because there were not signs in English. There were many crazy people trying to get us to take their private cars into the city and it took awhile for them to understand that we didn't want to go with them, they were super pesky. Stephanie caused a scene with one of them that was HILARIOUS. And I had to talk to 4 different people before finding out which bus to take. Then got dropped of in a shady area of Nanjing and took a creepy taxi to our hostel. The language barrier is difficult at times, but I'm happy that we were able to make it tour our hostel with relatively few problems. Our hostel is nice, though my computer doesn't get any internet, but whatever, I can survive. Nanjing is really big with 5 million people, but its odd because the city closes down completely around 10pm, which made for an uncomfortable surprise when we arrive at 11pm to closed shops and empty streets. Where is everyone!?