China

So I have to wait for three to eight weeks to get my working permit and two birds with one stone I will save money and visit friends in China I have made a travel plan; for about 23 days I will travel around, mostly by train, and stay with friends, at least most of the time, in China.

First I will start off by going to Shenzhen, depending on any Halloween plans here, of which I think there are none for me, I will either go on Thursday, Friday or Saturday next week (29th, 30th or 31st) and stay there in a hostel until Saturday afternoon when I will take a train to Shanghai, it is probably best to be there at least a day early to make sure I can get a ticket, and I will try to meet up with an online friend there that I've missed every single time I've been to Shenzhen.

Train to Shanghai is ONLY about 13 hours so I will arrive sometime really early on Sunday morning. The plan is to stay with Wenying and Linna in Shanghai but it seems rather complicated, in worst case I will have to skip Shanghai completely. The plan though is to stay there for about 3-4 nights, hang out with the two of them and meet my other Shanghainese friend and finally catch a train in the afternoon on the 5th.

To Beijing it's a bit further and the train takes about 17 hours but arrival is also in early morning. There I will stay in hostel though for a few days, I might do a night in Tianjin too to visit two friends there, and I will try to meet up with Nini and Mei and possibly some other friends too. I will leave Beijing with a train to Chengdu on the 11th, spending six nights in the same hostel I was in January.

Chengdu is actually not much further from Beijing than Shanghai is, the problem is the mountain range that the train has to go around so that trip actually takes 25 hours, which is the fastest train they have where the slower ones take 30 and 35 hours, so I will arrive sometime in the evening in Chengdu and then I will probably stay with Li Min when I'm there, either with her or Aaron I guess but I haven't talked to him much and I like her place better actually. I will try to meet up with as many friends as possible and since I have about 10 nights there it shouldn't be that much of a problem. I might go out of Chengdu for one or two nights but we will see about that.

Finally on the 21st I decided to fly back to Shenzhen instead of taking another 30, or even 50 for the slower one, train to Guangzhou and spending another few hours and 250HKD to get back to Hong Kong, the flight ticket was only 700 Yuan including all costs so it actually turned to be almost the same price as the train ticket.

This date is set because Deming will come to Hong Kong that day too and I might go with him to Macau for a few day and stay with him and his parents there. After that I'm not sure what happens, I have been considering looking for some place to live but if the working permit application still have a long time running I might as well go back to China for another few weeks.