I'm a firm believer that the best weekends are always the ones that don't go by the initial plan, and this weekend definitely proves that theory. Me, Phil, Sean and Elin set off to go to Zhuhai beach (which is right next to Macau), planning to have a night out there and stay in a hostel. Easy. Yep. Far too easy to go to plan in China. Our '2 hour' journey turned into an hour long journey to a central Dongguan bus station, an hour long wait for a bus there, our bus then returning to our local bus station in Houjie (making our journey to Dongguan a monumental waste of time), a 2 1/2 hour journey to Zhuhai, and what seemed like eternity wondering round Zhuhai trying to find the hostel we'd found (which was apparently just a block of flats... very difficult to find in a city filled with millions of blocks of flats). In the end we gave up on finding a hostel and decided to find a few others who had come to Zhuhai on the beach and figure it all out later, as the sun was going down and our day to the beach had turned into a frustrating day of buses and getting lost.
But this is China! And right when things are going terribly, something will come along and turn it around. And in this case, that something was when Lewis and Kathryn appeared like angels with their chinese friend Matthew. Given that I haven't seen anyone I was close to in Beijing since I've been down south, I was so happy to see these guys that the day instantly got a million times better. Everyone else decided to go get some dinner, so me and Phil went in Matthews car to try and find our hostel again. Even with a Chinese navigator we still failed. This is when an idea popped into all of our heads like a lightbulb being turned on... why didn't me and Phil just go back to Zhongshan with them? bingo! So we abandoned the beach, Zhuhai and all of our original plans to go to Lewis and Kathryn's new home and see a lot of other familiar faces... and it was goooooooooooood. We even had a bed to sleep in completely for free as they all have spare beds in their apartments, cushty!
Me and Phil even managed to find our way home without getting lost once today, which is a very rare occurence here, so all in all it's been a pretty successful weekend. I'm sure the beach will happen at some point so I'm not too upset about that, probably will go ahead when we've made a completely different plan altogether.
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