Right now I'm in Hainan, which is the province that's the furthest south you can get in china. I'm a 2 hour plane ride from wuhan, 4 or 5 from Harbin (which is where I was last weekend). I've noticed that it doesn't matter how big China is, these cities are all very similar.
They have the same Muslim noodles, the same small hole in the wall restaurants (which would be shut down in America for food sanitary reasons), the same shops spilling out onto the sidewalk from their little sections, the same fruit, vegetable, and street food sellers lining the streets welcoming the night crowd, the same bakeries with meat floss hiding inside their baked goods. They people are the same too. As soon as I stepped on the bus I heard the famous "waiguoren" ( foreigner ) the people at the stores welcomed my business and told me how good my Chinese is. A lady helped me out when she noticed the boss wasn't coming to collect my money. Friendly to foreigners (unless they can make an extra buck off you...)
I felt very comfortable walking these streets. Like I'm used to them. I was thinking to myself this morning "hmm... Tomorrow I'm going to a foreign country, little scared about that" then I laughed as I remembered that I'm in china... A foreign country!
China isn't all that foreign to me anymore. Still different, but not quite so foreign.
At the bottom I included a few pictures from Haikou. Not nearly as nice as Sanya.
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