Tuesday 14th September
Sunny is taking a nap now, its been a crazy day..more on that later.., so I'll catch up a little here.
OK so the last full update was the mini fashion show with friends in Wuhan while we waited for Sunny's father to arrive on the bus
I asked Sunny if she had booked the room for her father yet, she said no, then I said what if there are none available?....
So she runs of to the hotel reception in a fluster, she came back a little while later, apparently they will only let you book the one room per ID card.. Luckily her friends were with us so she borrowed one of theirs and went down to book the room. Now naturally here, the best laid plans never survive the first encounter as someone famous once said. She left her mobile in the hotel room and it rang when she was in reception.Her friends answered it and said it was her father saying his bus was arriving soon...
She eventually arrived back in the room and her friends told her that her father called, cue mad dash to get a taxi. Anyone who has ever been to the Wuchang District in Wuhan will know that rushing and the traffic there is a bad mixture - if ever an area chronically needed a proper underground public transport system it's Wuchang . The roads are utterly chaotic, the traffic lights have barely any meaning, and motorbikes go wherever they like. Honestly, I thought I had seen it all in China traffic wise, but Wuchang District raised the bar a few significant notches higher. Even Sunny says she is a bit scared of crossing the road there and that is saying something.
Anyhow, several close encounters with horrific death later, some lovely lungfuls of hot brown exhaust fumes straight from the rear end of several buses narrowly barrelling close by, we got a taxi. Of course her father called her, texted her and called her again en route, he had arrived and we were not there.
We arrived and picked him up and booked him into his room a few doors down from us, i think the sight of Sunny and her two bubbly girlfriends cheered him up and all was well with the world.
After we got him settled in his room we went fo lunch together, Sunny and I had been to an innocuous restaurant that looked very basic but wow, the food was mind blowingly good, and i don't say that lightly, it really was good, even by Chinese standards. Everyone dug in and all the dishes were cleared with gusto. Stomachs full and content it was decided why not get married this afternoon?!...
But the documents were in the hotel room and we needed to get our wedding photos taken still, and Sunny wanted to have her face make-up done for the photos.. Now its mid afternoon at this point and I'm think no way are we gonna make it before closing but try stopping a bunch of determined Chinese ladies ad you know you might as well try stop the earth turning by thought alone..
We found a place that did her makeup and took the pictures. This took about an hour or so and it was around 16:10 or so i think and the wedding office closed around 17:00 ..we were not going to make it (even if we had several hours left looking back it still wouldn't have been enough..more on that later).
Her friends and her father eventually arrived at the photo place with the papers and she told them that she didn't think we had enough time and we would do it as planned instead the next day.
Sunny's father had some other business to attend to in Wuhan that evening so he headed off his own way.
The girls decided that a trip to the Jiang'an district in Wuhan would be a nice evening trip. The best way to get there is by ferry across the Yangtze River. This costs 1.5 RMB early on rising to 5RMB for the later crossings. So super cheap. It was very nice had some great views.
Up until now my impressions of Wuhan had been pretty much - what a totally overcrowded, underserviced, polluted dump of a place! However Jiang'an was a total transformation. The pavements were walkable (not completely in bits with rubble, rubbish, open sewerage flowing etc etc like in Wuchang District), the traffic pretty much obeyed the rules of the road, and there was far far less litter and disgusting things on the pavement. There was nice clean shopfronts, decent pedestrian walkways, pretty much a decent modern city.Again huge skyscrapers were in mid construction in any direction you looked.
This part of the city has many old colonial buildings (built by the British I think?) that were impressive and obviously well built. I had my first taste of a Wuhan local food "hot dry noodles" which I'm glad i can say i ticked it off the list of things to do in Wuhan..lets just say I'd need to be hungry before eating those again.
We then went to down to the river shore and just sat there and chatted for a while. At one point a red Chinese lantern floated overhead. I said to Sunny is it let off to go in a certain direction or?..she just said it goes where it wants to go! I watched the lantern until the flame died out and it fell from the sky, hopefully not landing on someone's head!
I think i was still not fully adjusted to the time change and was utterly utterly exhausted at this stage and really just wanted to crash out. Eventually the girls decided it was time to venture back. Sunny hadn't seen these friends in a couple of years and one of them was staying in this area so there was tearful scenes as she went her way.
We got the boat back to Wuchang District, narrowly avoided death a few times navigating the traffic and motorcycles on the pavements on the way back to the hotel where i totally crashed out on the bed.
The next day we got married..
