China...is really weird.

I arrived in China last night. My trip was better then I thought it could be and mostly uneventful besides almost missing my first flight... even though I got there 5 hours early on accident haha... and this crazy weird lady starring at me and taking pictures of my laying down in the airport.  When I landed I went through customs and all that good stuff and then there were a million people on the other side and I couldn't find Matt for about 15 minutes. Our subway tickets had expired so we decided to take the "long distance bus."  What Matt didn't know was that for some reason this bus was going to take us to a random part of town that he had never seen before and then just leave haha. Of course there were random guys trying to give us a ride in their illegal taxi. It was really funny to see Matt talking to everyone in Chinese. We (and by we I just mean Matt) were talking to this Japanese man and trying to help each other figure out where we were and how we were going to get to were we needed to be. Finally we just ended up taking a regular taxi. They are super cheap it was like 5 US dollars to go all the way into the town (I think that was about 10 miles or something). Then we got out of the taxi at the train station where Matt's little scotter/moped thing was (it's called an e bike here I think.) And somehow both of us (me in a skirt), my giant suit case, two backpacks, me purse, and pillow made it to his apartment on that little e bike. Then I just took a shower while Matt went into the street market to grab some food. And after I ate I was out cold until now.

China is just really weird so far. It feels kind of like Gotham city meets the world when Wall-E is trying to clean it up. A lot of people drive really nice cars here. And then we pass this little area where people are just living in garbage, I don't know how else to explain it. It smells really bad and almost everyone is smoking everywhere. In this funny book I read about China once the author was saying that breathing cigarette smoke is probably better for you then breathing the regular air haha. There are also a bunch of people that drive these little bicycles that are attached to a little  flat bed trailer type thing and then ride around with a ton of junk on the back piled like 10 feet high at least.

We are going to Beijing this weekend! I'm really excited for that. I am just excited for this whole trip. I missed being in another country it's always so interesting. And more then that I really missed Matthew so it's nice to see him again. Ok the cat, "the general" wants me to play with him I think.
Until next time,
Marisa