CHINA! (As told by Andrew)
Well first off, getting to China.
This involves getting a loooooong flight to London Heathrow of 1 hour, big deal, the worst part is having to buy duty free stuff then not being able to take your drinks on the plane.
Then comes the fun part >:)
London Heathrow --> Dubai
It takes 7 hours on a plane.
7 hours in which you have less than 2 cubic metres to yourself.
7 Hours confined in a room full of strangers.
7 Hours with a little packet of crackers to keep you going.
It was awesome :D
There was games built into the plane and you could link them to the other passengers and have multiplayer tetris and battle ship, to name but a few.
dear god im still on the plane.
There was then another plane exactly the same except to Beijing.
RIGHT
Mainland China
Well Beijing was pretty cool, there is definately 9 million bicycles.
We decided that there's probably closer to 100 million thousand because we nearly got run over so much. It wasn't very... nice, where we were staying however, with 6 people to a room and air conditioning that nobody knew how to work at the time. Once you stood outside though, the first thing you noticed was the smog. It looked cloudy ALL of the time, when it actually wasn't. It was weird to say the least.
After a few days in Beijing I'd decided it could only get better. I'd soon acclimatise and it would be all fine :]
But i didn't.
We'd soon moved on to Xi'an, the party city :D It was a lot better, mostly because of the hostle.
Xi'an Bell tower youth Hostle. The best place in the world. 8 people to a room this time, no Air Conditioning (for the guys, the girls got it and COMPLAINED) and a horde of mosquitos attacking Leeroy everynight. but that was just the dorm. Outside in the main hostle, the walls. You were ENCOURAGED to graffiti on the walls, and this had braught forth all the travelling artists from around the world. I say artists. I mean good doodlers, but it was still beautiful. I had to place my mark upon the wall, so out came the whiteboard marker, and up went Cap'n Spermy! :D
I didn't make him, some other person did but i felt he should be drawn on the wall anyway.
He is now imortalised in whiteboard marker on a chinese youth hostle wall. God bless him.
Anywhooo, we were close to the Muslim Quarter so we went there a lot. It has EVERYTHING, Somy, Apple i-Pod, HUGOBOSS, Calven Clein, even Bluckberry. They truly do master selling.
(Sarcasm btw.)
And everything is actually worth 20% or less of what they offer (and you can usually get it for that price if you're a proficient haggler.)
Also the food there made everyone sick :]
I genuinely can't remember what we did next, so i'm going to pretend we went to the moon.
We went to the moon. It was a lot smaller than we thought, i was standing on the dark and light half simultaneously at one point. I pushed Jack and he flew right round and hit me it was fun. Then we started to get hungry so we ate the moon and now it is smaller in the sky the end.
But alas Andrew remembered what happened, not necessarily what came after Xi'an, but he remembered something about the trip.
We got another overnight train to Guilin. The overnight trains where in my top 10 things to happen on the trip, mainly because they where just like the 7 hour planes except a lot more phun. The beds where stacked 3 up. I claimed a top bunk everytime which meant i had to be a ninja to go to sleep at night :D
Guilin was a hell hole. There was nothing to do and the hotels had too many stairs. I did get to sleep with Jimmy on several occasions there, but all that did was make others jelous. We had to return to Guilin 4 times throughout the trip to get buses, and everytime we went there the group lost some more sanity. It had grape juice though and that made it all better.
After Guilin was the trekking phase i think, or the orphan phase. It might have been in between but it's hard to tell, Guilin was like the zone of no return. In fact we went white water drifting sometime as well but i can't remember when. I think Guilin stole all of my memories. It stole my charger part too, now i can't charge pre-2005 Sony Ericson's. God damnit Guilin.
ORPHAN PHASE! :D
They weren't orphans, just kids that had no parents atm so they all lived in a children's villiage. A lot of the houses they stayed in where just dorms, which were pretty kitted out with TV and books and stuff so I personally didn't think it looked that bad. We had the task of repainting one of the dorms however :D
We wanted to paint murals on the walls which we did, outlines of ourselves on the outer walls to remind them that Lagan College pwnd their wall. Then hannah painted a car on the inner wall and it was lovely cause i helped out a little :] The kids were better painters than us though, and we started to notice the little drawings on the walls at first, then Goku's and Kung Fu Panda's appeared overnight and we just had to paint them in for them. They seemed happy with our work and it made us feel proud to have helped non-orphan-orphans get a better house. We also made friends with some of them, such as Joe whom i forget his real name. He could tell us nothing in english and got scared and hid when we tricked Wooly into asking him for a kiss, oh how we laughed :]
TREKKING PHASE! (smells)
We went zoom up this here big mountainy thing then went accross them there places what where they grow rice the end.
That's pretty much all i have to say on the trek. It was walking along paths on strange terrain. There was a part where we were in danger of getting bitten by poisonous snakes though and that brightened it up a bit for me and a few others :D
Unfortunately one of our guides (Akubi) was scared of snakes and everytime there was even a sniff of one she'd yell out and we'd have to stop to see what was the matter. It was kind of funny at the time and it's still funny now a little but we still feel sorry for her. Our other guide Kevin used to work for Apple and we liked him because he played Half Life 2 :D
After the trekking phase came more Guilin the Hell Hole and another overnight train. This time to a place called sh... she... something and it was a tourist place of doom. The only hotel we could find was one facing 2 brothels and with another few down the street, we'd knew it would be fun :D
I once sat down the stairs watching TV in the lobby whilst Wooly, Jess and Hannah used the internet, and these strange men kept coming up to the main doors and asking something in chinese. The Hotel owner said something in return to him and the strange men left and went accross the street to the brothel. I wonder if they thought maybe i was selling? Cause they would have been right :[ (I had no money left at this point)
My favourite part of sh... she... whoreplace, was the KFC's everywhere, and since i'd been listening to one's iPod lately, i nicknamed the Colonel "Raoul" after the song of the same name.
"Let's go see Raoul :D"
HONGKONG:
Hongkong, the final 2 days.
I got sick. My first sickness stopping me from having fun on the whole trip and it struck at the stupidest of times :[
I wanted to see Reuben and Siobhan and Oscar who happened to be in HK at the time, but nooo i had to stay indoors. Also the plugs magically hopped from China to UK/US so i couldn't charge my phone or camera or iPod so it was possibly the worst 2 days for me.
They did have a 7Eleven which sold chocolate milk though so it was ok.
HOOOOOOME:
Finally where the 2 7 hour flights and the one hour one to Belfast then i was at home.
To anyone considering World Challenge: DO IT
It's worth spending a tonne of money on for the sheer fact of going somewhere awesome with a group of people you'll grow to love, then hate then be friends with.
i know i enjoyed it.
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