China Romance
All About China => Your trip to China => Topic started by: Philip on March 30, 2010, 05:02:28 pm
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In four days, I will be off to Changsha for the fourth time in 10 months.
This time next week, I could well be married for the first and last time.
Last year, I hadn't even imagined that I would be having a relationship with a Chinese lady. This year, I am starting a new job in Hong Kong and starting a new life with my new wife in China.:heart:
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Congrats and good luck Philip. Hope everything works for the best.
Jim & Gina
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Well Philip best wishes for continued success hope to see you
and your wife after you settle in HK.
Ted
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Congratulations Philip, cheers to the first and last time ... you avoided the "western trap" :angel:
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Nice one Phillip. As a fellow Londoner I doff my Titfor (Hat) to you and your lady and wish you all the best for the years ahead. Like me you are going for the first and last time. What is it with us Londoners going for a trouble and strife (wife) just once in our lifes. Maybe we arejust more sensible than the others!!!
Willy
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Philip, have a nice and wonderful trip, and keep us updated about your life in HK and with your "future" wife ;)
By the way, I wish you all the best in your new life :)
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Philip , four times in ten months .. isn't that against Forum Rules ? :huh: I need to talk with Martin and the other Mod's .
Anyway , if we don't hold you for further questioning ... have a wonderful Trip of your Life .
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I did four trips in the first five months visiting here? So I must have broke a few rules myself which is quite unlike me on here.:angel:
Glad all has worked out in the end Philip.
Changsha is a great place to marry. They have really good facilities for foreigners but do not forget to buy the cigarettes and candy from the nearby stores as that will cause any unseen problems to disappear.
I will be in Guangzhou on Friday 9th - 12th if you are passing through.
Willy
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Congrats Philip,
Hope this all works out for you and your new life is wonderful. Keep in touch...
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Yesterday was last day of term at my school. At the end of the day, the whole staff surprised me in the school hall by throwing confetti on me in the school hall and wishing me good luck in my impending marriage. It was quite overwhelming. 50 people saying really nice things about me. So much for trying to keep a low profile. My head teacher handed me some cards and presents. one of the presents was a book in which everyone had written kind words of congratulation.
I am glad I have avoided a stag party, one of the sad rituals of British pre-marital life. Getting drunk, smiling bemusedly at strippers and finding yourself naked and tied up in cold British countryside is not my idea of a good night out. If I want to celebrate my coming wedding with a bunch of guys, I would much rather come here.
I have encountered no disapproval, from either friends or family. I think they all know what this means to me. Plus, an interracial relationship is not a big deal for them to consider.
So, I fly from London at 9.20pm tomorrow, arrive in Shanghai at 3.45pm, wait until 9pm for my flight to Guangzhou, arriving at 10.55pm on the 4th. Don't know if anyone has any suggestions about what to do in Shanghai airport for 5 hours. Do they have internet access in the airport? I won't have a computer with me.
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Philip,
Great to hear you will be here, in Changsha, very soon! Send me a PM and maybe we can meet here if you will be spending a few day or more in Changsha! Wish you and your bride-to-be the best, here in China! :icon_biggrin:
Jim
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Philip congrats to you my friend..hope you two are really happy:icon_cheesygrin:
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I am glad I have avoided a stag party, one of the sad rituals of British pre-marital life. Getting drunk, smiling bemusedly at strippers and finding yourself naked and tied up in cold British countryside is not my idea of a good night out. If I want to celebrate my coming wedding with a bunch of guys, I would much rather come here.So, I fly from London at 9.20pm tomorrow, arrive in Shanghai at 3.45pm, wait until 9pm for my flight to Guangzhou, arriving at 10.55pm on the 4th. Don't know if anyone has any suggestions about what to do in Shanghai airport for 5 hours.
There for 5 hours - just make sure you do not end up getting drunk, smiling bemusedly at strippers andf finding yourself naked in a cold back street of Shanghai!!!
Willy
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Congratz Phillip. Peggy and I are in GZ for a couple of days then off to Shaoguan. I wish you all the best.
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Hi guys,
I am taking advantage of the free internet at Shanghai airport. Just killing the three hours until my flight to Guangzhou.
Trouble-free flight so far, China Eastern, no individual tvs, so I just tried to get some sleep.
Unlike most of last year, no-one was wearing those silly masks on the plane.
My Chinese lessons are starting to pay off. I am starting to recognize more of the signs and understand more of the conversations. My Chinese teacher is from Beijing, so I know I have a strong Beijing accent. I will be in Guangzhou late tonight and in Changsha tomorrow:heart::heart:
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Hi guys,
greetings from sunny Shanghai. I should be back in London today, but Icelandic ash has seen to that. I may have some standby possibilities for Tuesday, but I need to join the queue with a few thousand others. Otherwise, I have a flight rebooked on the 29th. I am thinking of getting a train back to my beloved Changsha. Shanghai is big and exciting and all, with its Maglev trains, skyscrapers and nightlife, but is a little menacing, to these London eyes. People seem to want to rip me off, or sell me Rolex watches (How quaint) or massages.
Short summary of my trip so far: I am now a happily married man. We got married on the 7th April, got our little red books, had a lovely honeymoon in Zhangjiajie, and had some traditional wedding pictures done. My wife is just the same wonderful person she ever was. There is only one difference now we are married. She insists on us taking buses, not taxis, ha ha!
I will post pictures when I return to England, and update you when I can. But you can add this to the success stories.
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Great to hear! Congratulations. I was supposed to go to Zhangjiajie, but had to change travel plans because of a wedding. I hear it is quite nice there.
Very happy you got your red book. Big congratulations!
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Congratulations !! "Philip" :fi_lone_ranger:
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Welcome in the Club for "Western Men Married To A Woman From Changsha". I think we are 5 today :icon_cheesygrin:
Have a happy marriage and a safe homecoming
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Congratulatios Phillip,
Changsha is a great place to be married from. I can remember sitting with you in a pub in London when you wondered if this day would ever come.!
Well it has and you have done it. And I wish you many happy years to come.
Welcome to the club.
You have finished work in London so why not catch that train and show her just how much you love her. The volcanic cloud will not last forever so wait until the UK airports have settled down.
Now if you want massages then I have two girls in Zhongshan - or is it messages they do?:angel:
Willy
Just seen that the ban on flights over the UK has been extended for another day!!
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Congratulations.
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Congratulations, welcome to the club. Now the hard part. Waiting for her to come live with you.
Jim
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congratulations to you and your bride
may all the best come to you in life
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I am finally back in England now, having got a standby flight 11 days after my originally-scheduled flight. So many things have happened, that I will not go through what happened every day, but I will talk about the main themes of my stay,
1. Wedding and Honeymoon
2. Hospitals in China
3. Living together
So, I am now a married man for the first time. After previous difficulties, it was remarkably smooth. Having wasted a Cerfificate of no impediment and a single certificate last year, I brought both this time, just to be sure. We got both documents translated (funnily enough in the same building where her old agency is, ha ha!) - that cost 200 yuan for each. Then we went to the Changsha marriage office and got our picture taken and our little red books within half an hour. Very simple. - 300 yuan.
On the same day, we visited her best friend in hospital (more on that later), and we went back to our favourite Yippee hotel. The next day, we booked a 3 day trip to Zhangjiajie for our honeymoon (700 yuan each, all expenses paid), and we booked the photo studio for when we returned (1300 yuan). On the day before we left for Zhangjiajie, we booked into a very cheap hotel near the station (80 yuan a night). My wife is very cost-conscious - she stopped us taking 10 yuan taxi trips and insisted we take 1 yuan bus trips.
The yellow dragon caves are spectacular, 17 km of massive caves, stalactites, underground river journeys and beatiful rock formations. We endured the rather amusing shops, where we were forced to experience some hard-selling of tea, kitchen knives and massage oils. Hardly anyone bought anything, but we all got a free massage, ha ha!
Zhangjiajie would have been better if it hadn't been pouring with rain. The amazing cable car ride was slightly spoiled by not being able to see much through the fog, but my wife was grateful for that. But if you love nature, wonderful karst rock formations, exotic ancient woodland, rushing rivers, you will be stunned by this place. I would love to return on a sunny day. Two days was not a bad amount of time to get a taste of the place, but a week would be better.
Wild monkeys are everywhere. You are advised not to feed them. My wife ignored this and gave one of our dumplings to a large monkey. He then proceeded to rip my entire supply of dumplings and cakes from the bag in my hand. I could have sworn the other monkeys called him 'Martin'. Ha ha!
We walked a lot and returned to the hotel with happily sore calves.
So, the marriage and honeymoon cost less than 4000 yuan. Not bad.
We discussed rings and she advised not getting them, even though I know she wants one. She told me I had spent a lot already on flights and other expenses. I felt a bit bad, but I will get her a ring later. Can anyone advise me on where to go, because I have no idea where to get a good deal. Would it be advisable to find a ring in Hong Kong, or on the mainland?
When we returned to Changsha, we went to have our photos taken. We might have spent a bit more having some outside photos had the weather not been so atrocious. I watched my wife being made up, foundation, eye-liner, false eyelashes etc. We both were very co-operative, it felt a bit artificial, some of the poses made me feel like a catalogue model, staring off into the distance, standing like a Victorian patriarch, but it was worth it to see how beautiful she looked. Lots of costume changes, it was quite fun really. The only bit of photoshopping they did was to remove the lines in her neck when she turned her head, so not too bad.
The most important thing about our wedding and honeymoon was how natural and comfortable we are together. We have very similar temperaments. We are both quietly determined, will walk till we drop, are sexually very compatible and are very patient with each other's language difficulties. Oh, and we love each other.
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:heart:Oh, and we love each other:heart:
Philip ,
I know this was your last sentence of your wonderful Story , but it had that all over it already .
Just great to see both of you Married and in Love . Do we have Pictures coming soon ? Hope so .:icon_cheesygrin:
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Phillip,
A good read but would not mind you expanding a little.
Shaun
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Hospitals.
I seemed to spend a lot of time in hospitals this visit. My wife's best friend was knocked off her electric bike last month, and she hit her head, causing memory loss and she broke her leg.
My wife's friend is a nice person, who has an interesting personality, very different from my wife's placid and calm one. She is almost always arguing with someone, on the phone or in person. She has an almost-permanent affronted expression on her face. It is difficult to tell whether she is seriously offended or just joking. Her eight year old son's expressions are the only clue to whether she is telling him off or joking with him. He knows. I don't have a clue. She lives in a very modest and dark ground-floor flat in Changsha. The living room is like a garage, unpainted concrete floors, her two bikes, a wooden bed and a little table. Her bedroom is equally modest, with a bed, a computer and an old sofa. The kitchen is very small and basic (there is a duck and a chicken who live there) The squat toilet/shower is tiny. There is an energy-saving bulb in each room, but they give out little light. The wiring looks very dangerous and there is no decoration on any of the walls, no paint, no wallpaper. She is 38, she has a younger brother, who visits regularly and uses the computer - he is very pleasant and friendly. She has two older brothers, who she gets on with, but argues with a fair bit.
On the day we got married, my wife and I visited her friend in the 8th Changsha hospital near the station. It was not very clean or hygienic. Her room had broken tiles and had not been decorated since ever. The walls were shabby and dusty. Her friend's mother was there looking after her, they shouted at each other a lot. A male friend received the same treatment, especially when he started smoking a cigarette in her room. The only people the friend never shouted at were my wife, me, and her younger brother. The friend struggled to her feet a few times and tried to hobble down the corridor, to practise walking. The nursing staff seemed mostly disinterested.
A few days later, returning from our honeymoon, we visited her again on the day she was being discharged from the hospital. To get from the hospital to the taxi, my wife carried her friend on her back. I offered to help, but she insisted. The taxi went to a different hospital, slightly cleaner, but not much. I think she wanted a second opinion on her treatment. This time the male friend carried her on his back. The male friend offered all the male medical staff cigarettes. (Unbelievable!)
A few days later came the news that the friend's father had broken his leg in a traffic accident. We took a slow uncomfortable two hour bus ride to the orthopaedic hospital in Liu Yang, a small town maybe 40 miles East of Changsha. This was an incredibly dirty, rundown and dangerously unhygienic place, dark, dirty corridors full of beds with dirty linen, uncleaned toilets, and a massive pile of waste just piled up in the car park. Her father was in a bad way, but I couldn't help feeling he'd be better off at home. My wife had to leave after a while because she felt nauseous because of the smells in the hospital. We took a hairy motorcycle ride to the bus station on a bike with an umbrella, just about keeping out the driving rain. Then we took the slow bus home.
There were many arguments in the days that followed between the friend and her brothers. She hasn't been working for a month. She has had to pay the hospital bills with the support of her brothers. Now the brothers are having to pay the father's bills. It is no fun being ill in China. Thank God for the National Health Service in Britain.
A few days before I left the friend went to yet another Changsha hospital, this time much cleaner and better run. She was having painkilling injections because she had overstretched herself visiting her father in hospital. She doesn't really trust the doctors to operate on her father, so she wants to be with him. All this time, my wife and I tried to be as helpful as we could, bringing food and cooking for her and just providing some moral support and trying to reduce the stress.
On my last day but one, she asked us to accompany her younger brother to the East Changsha bus station, so that he could visit her father. I didn't know why we had to accompany this man in his twenties, but my wife explained that he was a bit slow and couldn't speak very well (news to me). He just seemed to be a polite and pleasant young man. He gave up his seat on the bus to an elderly woman - first time I've seen anyone do that in China. But the friend phoned when we reached the station to say she had made a mistake and that the brother wasn't to visit after all. It was at this point when my wife asked me whether I wanted to visit the friend's father the next day. By the look on her face, I know that she didn't really want to go, but didn't want to be disloyal to her friend. When I suggested we spend the day together in Changsha, she smiled and looked very relieved that I had made the decision for the both of us. She said that her friend might be disappointed, but when we asked her, she said it was fine. Both my wife and I are keen to help out friends who need help, but we know we need to draw the line somewhere, and make sure we find time for each other.
I am getting used to crossing the road in Changsha - it's like a dangerous kind of line-dancing. But after these two road accidents to these two family members, I can understand just how dangerous it can be to deal with Chinese traffic.
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My wife's best friend was knocked off her electric bike last month, and she hit her head, causing memory loss and she broke her leg.
Was she wearing a helmet ?
Here in Kaiping, it amazes me to see three people on scooters. Small children would stand in the front holding the handlebars WITH NO HELMET. Or small babies would be between the two helmet wearing adults ... again with no helmet.
Also people carry almost everything on their scooters ... chickens, rice sacks, construction materials etc etc ...
I thought the hospitals here were inefficient but Changsha's sounds worse. The funny scene here in Kaiping is that many groups of patient hower over the doctor's desk. There's no such thing as a private conversation about your situation. In the middle of a consultation, new people arriving would interupt the conversation with their own question. AND the doctor would answer it !!!
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Congratulations....awsome story!!
Rick
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Living together
Having never been married before, I am amazed at how married life seems to suit me. I know this is only the beginning, the honeymoon period, quite literally, and that the acid tests will come later, after months, after years. But I think that the months writing to each other have been very useful in establishing our relationship and our views about the most important subjects.
I find that our temperaments are very well suited. Patience and determination. I bought a simple visual dictionary for my wife, with words in Chinese and English. We lay for hours on the bed, working out the correct pronunciation for things like parts of the body. She worked very hard at getting the words right, writing down an approximation of the English pronunciation in Chinese. We had a great laugh, getting it wrong, then getting it right. I had to admire her calm determination. It's things like that, striving to achieve something which makes our relationship stronger, which mean most to me. Not so much the great places we visited, fantastic though they are. It's more the ordinary, everyday time we spend together, eating, walking hand-in-hand, buying food, watching bad TV, etc.
In China, Maxx's 24 hour rule is not really possible to observe when you are spending every sleeping and waking minute with someone, but his other rule, different culture, different customs, you certainly can observe. I can give a couple of examples of when I kept this rule in my mind: 1. Litter - many people, including my wife, are happy to throw litter on the ground - this never failed to annoy me. Even in a beautiful natural place like Zhangjiajie, people were happy to throw their plastic waste on the floor, despite the bins everywhere and the signs asking them to respect the environment. My reaction - well I said nothing, just made a point of putting all my rubbish in the bins. By the end of my stay, my wife started to do the same. 2. Queuing and pushing - people make jokes about English people that they love to queue, but in China, every bus queue is a scrum and a free-for-all. It's survival of the fittest. I can't count the amount of times we stood around fairly purposelessly, then suddenly, a bunch of men started knocking old women and children down in order to get their precious seat on the bus. In England it is just common courtesy to give up your seat to pregnant women and old people.
So I found it difficult to get used to these customs, but rather than jump in and express my disapproval, I made a point of giving up my seat (when I could). My wife gave me some funny looks, but I was happy to explain why I did what I did.
Having an extra week with my wife (courtesy of the volcano) was fantastic. A week to do ordinary stuff. Last time I visited, she was touchingly scared by a cheap horror attraction. This time she was terrified by Jurassic Park on the TV, and traumatised by Alice in Wonderland in 3D. My shoulders still hurt from the amount of times she dug her nails into my skin. Ha ha. Walking through Changsha, strolling along the riverbank, watching the guys play Mah Jongg or cards, eating stinky tofu, watching some Chinese street theatre, playing badminton, visiting her friends, sitting in a park chatting using our Besta translator, eating a cheap meal in a different restaurant each day. I loved it all.
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Queuing and pushing - people make jokes about English people that they love to queue, but in China, every bus queue is a scrum and a free-for-all. It's survival of the fittest. I can't count the amount of times we stood around fairly purposelessly, then suddenly, a bunch of men started knocking old women and children down in order to get their precious seat on the bus. In England it is just common courtesy to give up your seat to pregnant women and old people.
So I found it difficult to get used to these customs, but rather than jump in and express my disapproval, I made a point of giving up my seat (when I could). My wife gave me some funny looks, but I was happy to explain why I did what I did.
I noticed in Shenzhen similar incidents, however on the bus I did see many times younger people offering their seats to people with young children in tow. Also many times people would offer their seats for me to seat down (must be the movie star syndrome :angel:). Even my wife, if their was only one seat vaccant would wish me to take it. Of course I refused, and as also in passing through doors, she and her friends became use to my announcement "Ladies 1st" policy.