Last week, I wrote this blog about my nightmare trip to Shenzhen, where I was spending a few days of the Chinese New Year Holiday. The journey, as the title suggests, was nightmarish. But, I actually made it and survived. Great!
The rest of the holiday was, I'm sorry to say, entirely painless and wonderful.
Day 1
After arriving at the airport, I was immediately met with another Covid test in the airport. This was a more brutal one than before, right down my throat and rammed into the flesh pretty hard. Very almost gagged and was kinda swollen even more for the rest of the day.
I was picked up by 
Apparently that's a thing in the bird world.
The birds wear cute little diaper things so they can freely fly around. They tend to drop bombs every 15 minutes so their freedom would be a disaster otherwise.
Day 2
Next day, we all headed off to the beach! I honestly never even considered such a thing in China, as the entire coast is a polluted hell hole of fishing, plastic, trash and sewage. Presumably.
It was a long drive. Seemingly a few hours but I'm not sure. We drove right past a Covid hotspot. We knew it, because the junction turning off the highway was blocked by government vehicles and policemen barricading and keeping watch of the area. If we happened to go within the zone even just an inch, our 'green code' would have turned yellow or red, and I wouldn't be going back to work tomorrow! I'd be quarantining. Kind of a ridiculous oversight that one can get quarantined for driving, alone, in a car, 3 centimetres on a road on the outskirts where a single building had a single person infected, but, that's China for ya.
We stopped off for lunch at a very quaint farmland-type place. It's not the kind of farm you're thinking of, but more some local folks trying to make as much use of the small land they had as possible.
The scenery was becoming ever more mountainous and pretty as we moved away from the city!
The big hole in the ground on the right above turned out to be somebody's tomb.
The lunch was quite modest but pretty nice, even though there's always something I, a lame-tongue'd Brit, couldn't eat.
Although some of my earlier descriptions of the beaches in these areas kind of rang true - there was a lot of trash that had kind of integrated into the shore as pseudo-rocks over the years - the water was down south of China, which is much nicer than the water to the East, and it was apparently one of the best little seaside areas in the province. Shenzhen is sub-tropical, only slightly north of Vietnam, so the trees were still green, the flowers still out, and the weather still fairly pleasant (not enough to go swimming, though).
To top things off, the sky was blue, the breeze was fresh, and there was, compared to what I'm used to, not many people! I did not anticipate that when I made the choice to go from one big-ass ugly city to another.
We separated as a couple early on as the parents looked for parking, and we met up towards the end. During which, we found a pretty amazing 7-11 convenience store which had a magical coke bottle machine.
in short, you put a room-temperature bottle of coke in a little holder, press a button, and after a couple of tiny jolts, the whole bottle was so cold, you saw the ice float to the top! What kind of witchcraft...?
Not much of a picture, but at least it's evidence of magic
Interestingly, applying the same to a bottle of water didn't work, even though there was no observable secret mechanics in the lid, wrapper or bottle of coke itself...
Below - my favourite picture of the day, a random butterfly - possibly dead, alive or both - chilling by one of the rock pools.
There's a lot more worth talking about but I'll be here all day if I went through every detail. So, onward!
Day 3
Day 3 was kind of opposite to day 2 in a way, as we were off to the 'mountains'. As the parents went off to check some new real estate, we went for a mini hike. I'm not sure it really counts as a mountain as we reached an elevation of barely 250m from sea level, and it was a very smooth ascension as we looped round, but we did end up in different districts as we followed the mountains round.
I found these crazy infestation of bugs on some plants that were seemingly made of powder. I was sure they were dead and infected by some kind of cordyceps fungi or maybe just the exoskeleton remains. An image search on Google showed me otherwise. They are an actual species of bug, though not much was written about them, only their family. Basically, they're an unpleasant infestation.
To me, they look like frickin' aliens.
If you zoom in carefully on the right picture, you can see some eggs on the leaf so... are they alive?? Maybe 
As you can see, I didn't think to take many pictures of the actual mountainous scenery other than these cool train tracks and twizzly plant roots, so you'll just have to take my word for it, the place was very peaceful.
We took a turn off the mountainside when we got to a dam that could be walked on by the public, and got some pretty great views of the city from above:
When you actually get on the dam (seen above), there is a long line of quotes written across the walls in historical order, all relating to appreciating nature in some way.
Left: Running water never goes stagnant (referring to maintaining active lifestyle)
Right: Water can carry a boat, but it can also be a force to capsize it (referring to political balance)
Following the dam views, we took a brief break on the dry side, chilling out on the grassy knoll sloping down to the street below. As we chilled, we saw below us, a middle-aged man walking backwards, presumably some kind of weird Chinese exercise. You see it a lot around here.
Little did he know, there were, inexplicably, random holes built into the floor seemingly designed specifically to make people fall into them. As we watched with joy (they weren't huge holes), he did exactly as anticipated, got up, looked around to check nobody saw, and walked off casually... forwards.
We Saw.
I later considered how lucky he was that he DID choose to walk backwards, as he simply stepped in and landed on his butt. If forward and somehow still failed to see, he could have broken his shins. This has happened to me twice in the last few weeks with random potholes in my area, so I'm quite familiar with the sensation of falling down holes.
Day 4
Day 4 was my return day. In the morning, I got up and very nervously, as promised, made full English Breakfast for the family. It was pretty bad, so i'm not gonna share pics. But here's the catastrophic meal as I saw it:
- It was pretty hard to find western ingredients such as Baked Beans and decent Sausages.
- The parents were not accustomed to meaty, greasy meals for breakfast, so I decided to cancel the fried eggs and go scrambled
- The potatoes had gone green in the sunlight and thus, inedibly bitter. Not a staple of full english, but a good replacement for hash browns. So that was scrapped
- It wasn't my kitchen. Had no idea where half of anything was.
- Chinese kitchens lack any kind of oven or grill
- I don't really eat tomatoes or mushrooms so I never really cook them for myself; unfamiliar territory
- Limited time before flight
That being said, after serving - without baked beans because I forgot until halfway through the meal - everyone at least pretended to enjoy it, and we headed off to the airport, where, thankfully, the entire journey was completely painless and straightforward.
Back to work
After another week off mostly to myself, I finally have to return to reality in... 5 hours. Damn. this 'morning' I woke up at 12:15pm. This morning (the next one, as it's now almost 1am), I have to get up at 6pm.
Why do I torture myself like this every vacation...
Well, thankfully I know that the first day back is usually a day of basically nothingness for me. Maybe a meeting or two where I pretend to be engaged in things that have nothing to do with me. I think I can handle that on 5 hours sleep.
Hope y'all enjoyed pointlessly scrolling through the pics!