Well I am back in China now, writing from Wuhan where the air is so polluted you could stir it with a stick today, but more on first Wuhan impressions later.
My flight to China took a bit longer than expected. The first flight to Paris was uneventful but the connecting flight from Paris to Hong Kong was a nightmare.
We all got on the plane and after about 45 minutes sitting there , the cabin getting hotter and hotter in the sweltering sunshine with the aircon not working for some reason.. the pilot told us all there was some kind of technical fault and the engineers were working to isolate it. They expected to take about an hour.
An hour later they had found the problem and were replacing whatever the part was...an hour later we were told they were running some tests which is why the aircon wasn't working and apologies for the heat...the cabin must been near 40C by then. The cabin staff were great though with free drinks. Another hour later they announced that the problem was fixed but due to French air regulations they now had to change the cabin crew...and about 2 minutes later or over fours delayed sitting on the tarmac we took off...
On a 12 hour flight the last thing you want is an extra 4+ hours added to it, I was hot , sweaty and had a very sore bum by the time the plane landed. To make matters worse, i had arranged to meet Sunny in Guangzhou East railway Station after the intercity train n from HK arrived around 11:30, but now i was still in the air .. I knew she would be full of excitement an happiness waiting for me to arrive and now i wouldn't be there, i couldn't tell her why and she would be worried and upset and i was powerless to do anything about it!
As son a sI got through immigration in HK airport i found a payphone but the damn thing was incomprehensible to use, regular international numbers didn't work, they wanted to add extra number in front of the international one, numbers for areas codes in-between, in the end i just decided that this was wasting further time so got the Airport Express the HK metro then went to Hung Hom station. There I got a phone sim card in a 7 -eleven and called Sunny. Naturally she was very relieved to know all was fine and I told her when I would be arriving there. She decided to rest in the hotel she had booked for us and come back to the train station later.
The train was fine and she was there to greet me at the other end, truly wonderful, I could scarcely believe it was six months since we were together.
We had planned to open an account with Bank Of China to deposit all the money i brought across ad it was quite a lot but now the banks were closed, so that meant we could buy the engagement ring either which was a bit of a setback.
Anyhow, we went to the hotel which is a kind of apartment hotel and it was simly wonderful, super clean and comfortable and spacious and at 230 RMB a night super value. We then had a nice meal and settled in for the night.
The next day, Saturday was full on.. I was still pretty jet lagged but we had things to do!
We opened a bank account with no problems but apparently in the weekend they would only accept a certain amount of foreign currency per customer which wasn't enough for the ring, so we put half into my account and half into Sunny's account and she then transferred that into mine, job done!
Two of my notes had a number hand written on them in small characters and they wouldn't accept these! I got these from an Irish bank in the first place but they were having none of it!
After that we went for lunch and then to choose some dresses for the wedding pictures on Sunday. I was severely suffering jet lag still and kept nodding off whilst Sunny tried dresses, I wanted to be more helpful but really all i wanted to do was get some sleep.
After that I suggested we go for an afternoon nap as it was pretty hot and I was very tired. Sunny agreed and we went back to he hotel and sleep for a couple of hours.
Her mother then rang her and suggested that we come to her parents apartment for dinner. We did that and had a rather delicious meal. I had a nap while mother was cooking dinner which Sunny reassured me was perfectly fine to do in Chinese culture, I really appreciated it as the delicious smells of mothers cooking wafted through the air.
The cooking as usual was brilliant and even though I didn't understand the conversation everyone seemed happy and mother even joked that my belly was like fathers now too..i didn't need to understand the Chinese to understand the gestures, much hilarity ensued!
We then headed off back to the apartment and just relaxed for a little and then went to bed happy and content together.
Sunday we had an early start..it was the all important photo change. Because of the system at weekend (even number licence plates can drive on some days during peak hours and odd vice versa), we had to arrive early as the photo studios number was not supposed to travel during peak time so we got there at 07:30
They took us and two other couples (one of which were Sunnys friends - we got some kind of special price as they both booked with the same agency).
They took us to the outskirts of the city to this place that was totally bizarre, some the guys here will have been to similar places. It was a big plush building with kind of stage sets all around outside, kind of mock Tudor buildings, train stations, forbidden palace all kinds of weird and wacky things, there were buildings with special stage sets - winter , forests, forbidden palace, sandy beach. Inside was incredibly plush with three floors of booths and hundreds of brides and grooms dressed up in full wedding regalia, both old and new style, some even military from wthat i can see. It is truly bizarre to be tripping over brides and grooms everywhere with cameramen taking pictures EVERYWHERE, it was surreal to say the least. Sunny and I went though five different costume changes. I got make-up done and patched up in between costume changes and she had her hair and makeup completely redone each time and looked absolutely stunning. It was a long process and quite tiring, I really didnt know how to act, i found standing in front of the camera in hundreds of different poses strange and a bit uncomfortable but it made sunny happy so i'd do it again any time if needed. The pictures will be interesting to say the least!
After the pictures we went back to her apartment and cleaned of the layers of make-up on our faces and then went out engagement ring shopping. Sunny found a lovely ring and she was delighted. We had agreed that I would propose to her romantically before she would wear it.
However the flight delays had scuppered my original plans for that. As luck would have it , at 8PM in Panyu Square there is a nice water fountain display to music every night which is really nice and good fun, its also the same square that Sunny and I shared our first kiss...
So i led there to that spot and to the sound of water fountains and music i got down on one knee and proposed and she said yes and we had a lovely walk around the square together, her admiring her ring all the time.
This morning we got up early and flew to Wuhan, it was Sunny's first flight and she quite enjoyed the experience I think, i made sure she got a window seat.
Landing in Wuhan I am very struck by the amount of new building going on here, every skyscraper here seems to be new, it is like Guangzhou except even more so ALL the skyscrapers here are being built now where as in GZ its pretty developed already. The pollution in Wuhan seems to be really bad. There is flooding all around the city as could be seen from the aeroplane on final approach so you would expect there to be little dustiness, but every thing here is dusty and filthy dirty. The Mercedes car lot we passed has maybe a hundred cards ageing a year a day by the looks of things, they were covered in a brown layer of dirt and muck.
The air is very smoggy and has a tang of building cement to it, the roads are jammed with buses and motorbikes. This no holiday destination for sure.
However it is the city we are getting married in so i think its going to be a place i have warm affections for
Once settled in to the hotel we went out for lunch and ate at a Wuhan restaurant some stuff I've never seen before but as usual was delicious. Sunny even asked the chef to show me one of the vegetables as she wasn't sure i understood what she was describing. The chef laughed and brought out some kind of root vegetable, it was green inside and had a kind of turnip but not turnip flavour, hard to describe!.
After that we went for a nap in the hotel and then went to meet some of Sunny's university friends which she hasn't seen in a couple of years since moving to Guangzhou. They were all delighted to see her and we all went to the local town where her University was and had a lovely meal together. After wards we went for a walk around the campus and Sunny showed me where they studied and where her dorm room was. All the time the air was warm and pulsing with the sound of crickets whilst a distant thunderstorm flickered in the sky and grumbled in the distance.
We got a taxi bact to the city centre afterwards dropping of Sunny's friends on route.
That distant thunderstorm got closer and closer, and by the time we got back to the hotel it was right overheat and utterly bucketing down, the taxi driver felt it just fine to drive without the wipers going on full, it wasn't until the street ahead was a milky blur that he deemed it necessary to put on the wipers properly! We dashed onside the hotel and went to bed, a great ending to a dramatic day.
