Umpa Lumpas

Published on Jan. 6, 2007 in China

Back in Guangzhou, things don't seem to be too bad. Yan-Shih woke me up again, wanting to brush her teeth. She kindly let me sleep after that, although I couldn't. At some point I decided to stop trying to fake sleep, and played some rummy. While in Guangzhou, we had two options: 1) buy the fast train ticket for 70kuai, leave in under an hour. Or 2) buy the slow train ticket for 45kuai, leave in five hours. Considering the cost to change my airline ticket would be 175usd (actually more than I paid for the round-trip ticket to begin with), we were in turbo-cheap mode. Normally we are just plain old cheap, but now we were REALLY cheap. We took the later train.

As a reward, we decided to visit the little rice ball store that we liked so much. The store had, on endless repeat (same song the last time we were there), some version of The Umpa Lumpa song, but in Chinese.

You know, Umpa Lumpa Doomba Li Do, or whatever the words actually are. (Sorry if the song is now stuck in your head). Yan-Shih explained that the song is actually the "rice ball song," and they are just repeating "Rice balls rice balls, we have rice balls. Come here for rice balls. We have rice balls. Rice balls." Indeed, they had some really good rice balls.

The Internet almost works. Well, it almost works really poorly. But for the first time since the earthquake I was able to check my email. I gave my mom access to my email, so she could check things out, and saw what she had read. Things seem to be in order, so back to the train station.

We arrived in Shenzhen quite late, but having already spent much time in Shenzhen, we knew how to get around. 30 minutes later we arrived at the hostel, to the acclaims of "Kelvin's back, Kelvin's back!" Checking into our Japanese style room, we quickly fell asleep.

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