Zhuhai - Part 1 - Joyce and Almen

A way too early start for my comfort, I had to get up at around 5.45am, I tried to catch the first bus to the airport. I found quite quickly that I could have slept at least half an hour longer though, the bus stop just outside my house also has a stop for the airport bus so I didn't have to walk the 15 minutes I had expected, and I was really early anyway. The bus never showed up though so finally I gave up and took a taxi, paid 80 kuai which is about twice of what it should have cost but I didn't care much. What surprised me mostly that morning was how sufficient my clothing was
, I only had jeans, t-shirt, a fleece sweater and my hat, gloves and scarf; it really wasn't cold at all. The reason was that I was going to some place really warm and couldn't really bring any thick clothes, and I figured that it would only be a short ride to the airport then it would all be fine so a little cold cold be survived, but there was no need even.

I hadn't had any breakfast, all places were still closed when I left, I did get a quite decent breakfast during the flight though, some kind of rice porridge that was quite ok. After being up from before 6am, waiting for nearly 45 minutes in the cold, airport businessing for 45 minutes, flying for about 2 hours, more airport business, a bus ride for 3 hours from the airport to Zhuhai and finally a 20 kuai taxi ride for the 500m from the bus station to Joyce's and Almen's so called five star hotel, that is nearly 7 hours of travel time, I was pretty starved. The hotel was rather nice actually but I still wouldn't call it five star, at least not if comparing to dad's. What was a lot nicer was seeing Joyce, well and Almen too of course but that is not really comparable.

The girls where hungry too so we went to one of the hotel's restaurants and had a really big lunch and basically just catching up. After lunch we went out to some small shopping street that seemed to be the city center for Zhuhai, also like 500 meters from the hotel and actually it turned out to be just where my bus stop was. We just walked around tiredly and didn't really do anything, finally we tried to localize ourselves and somehow found the way, after a whole lot of confusion, back to the hotel by foot.

We decided to rest a bit and then go to a park, but before our rest was done dad called us and we took a taxi to his, real five star, hotel and then went out with him for dinner. We went to some seafood restaurant, of course, and had loads of dishes, I actually don't remember half of it, damn I was tired.

The night was not over yet though, we went to find a shopping mall where dad wanted to buy helicopters, but that one is another story. After that we went back to Joyce's and Almen's hotel to drop off our newly acquired stuff and then went to a cafe near there to have some drinks and play with their weird fortune telling machine, apparently I have 5 stars in luck and 5 stars in love... Kaj and Joyce both had some weird jelly drink stuff that looked really fun but Joyce said it didn't taste that good, Almen had some other drink and I just had some ginger Coke. After that we went back to their hotel, took some funny pictures and tried to make a movie that I intend to upload here then we all went to our owns and slept.

The morning after I overslept breakfast but so did the girls, dad was working of course so it was just the three of us now. Again we had lunch at their hotel but in anther restaurant, much nicer in my opinion actually, we mostly had some dim sum and I really love the sweet bun dessert with some juicy mixture in them.

We pretty much stayed at the hotel the whole afternoon, first we went to play bowling, I think it was really fun despite the low scores we all got. Joyce had never played before but she caught up quite quickly, her low score was mostly because her concentration was just up and down all the time and after a few games I guess she got rather tired. My scores was probably also low because of concentration lack, it often like that for me when bowling, I can sometimes strike three or even four times in a row and then do total misses for two or three times. This time I managed to impress with a strike at the first throw and then not do anything good at all. Almen played quite steadily I think, both of them actually managed a strike or two, which is quite impressive for someone who has never played or only played once.

Once bowling was done we still had about an hour before going to the ferry terminal to leave off the girls and meet Ariel, so we went to the same café again and had some more weird drinks, or I had a weird one this time, I think it was watermelon juice, and Joyce and Almen just had mocca. We had some nice desserts too, some weird pancake things, one with peanut butter in that that was absolutely delusions and another sandwich thing with melted cheese and ham, goodie! We finally had to go to the ferry terminal but Ariel's boat was a bit late so they never go to meet her, we said our goodbyes and then they left.