Published on July 5, 2007 in China

Early in the morning, 6:00am, we arrived in Guangzhou. Can you guess what we did? We ate rice balls, of course. Maybe I should explain what a rice ball is. Although Taiwan does rice balls differently, the ones in Guangzhou are usually in a dark sesame paste/soup, and are filled with peanut butter. Yum.

After rice balls we checked email (since it was really cheap), and wandered around the nearby mall. We needed to purchase about three days worth of food since the trainride would take over 60 hours. At 13:00 we boarded our train, and met our bunkmates: two girls from Hong Kong (May and Kwin) and a guy from Malaysia. We started chatting, and soon started playing cards. They taught me how to play German Bridge, which would soon become the card game of the trip.

For the rest of the afternoon we played bridge, read, and chatted. Soon night took over, we had our instant noodle dinner, and fell asleep.

The next few days were consumed with bridge and reading. The Malaysian guy jumped off the train in Xining, and we made friends with a local Tibetan girl. I can now count to three in Tibetan, and now how to say hello/thank you, and even more importantly: beer.

Expect updates about Lhasa soon.