TIC: Mid December - Christmas

Ok, this time I'll make sure the post has everything in it.

Dec. 5th Hank the Tank hard at work. He works in the office for a upscale gift shop ordering products and doing graphic design.

We went out to lunch after to a Chinese fast food place. The food was pretty horrendous and overpriced. Instead of giving you a sign with a number, they have signs for everything on the menu as you can see here.

Later we took a walk and ended up at Zhuhai's fisher girl statue.

I tried asking these girls why they were all dressed the same and they twisted my arm to take a photo with them. I think they worked for a spa or some medical themed company. Later I saw another foreigner. He turned out to be Fredrik from Sveden, we talked for a while and later went Go-Karting that night.

Dec. 14th My good friend Pearl came to visit. We went for a walk to Haibin Gong Yuan and ended up hiking the hill there. THis is at the top. On the seaside of the apex there was a trail that hadn't been taken for years, so we adventured through it.

In the middle of the adventure trail. Near the bottom, we finally found a way out, but had to climb down a tree to get to a lower level maintenance door.

And of course we popped out right at the fisher girl statue.

The next day we went to Macau. The hybrids are different here.

FINALLY! Strangely enough though, fireworks are just as illegal in China as in America. Who would have thought?

Pretty hard to guess the meaning of this Portuguese.

Across the way was some sort of temple or something.

Macau has a ton of casinos... and the one good thing is that they all have free shuttle buses to the border, ferry station and airport. We took the first bus and ended up at this casino called Ponte No. 16. This is our return to the casino to take the shuttle back after it started raining. They wouldn't let us in to the casino because we had toothpaste with us.

On the 16th, I asked my mechanic about some interesting places in Zhuhai, he said Zhen zhu Le Yuan was really far but the most fun. We just asked people to point us in the right direction and finally got there. We were both surprised when we were going to Pearl Land. Coincidence? Later we took the bike further North and found a strip of Colleges with Beijing Normal University at the end. It was the biggest and best looking campus.. I'd like to go there, but they didn't have any Chinese classes for foreigners.

The weather got cold the next day so I didn't get any pictures for a while. On the 22nd, we went to New Yuan Ming Palace. I always see this place on my morning jogs and wondered what was inside. Today I would find out.

A panoramic of the lake inside the park.

A little guy here was feeding some really hungry fish.

This is one of the European castles on the side of the park.

And another. Later we came back here for a show.

Out on a gazebo bridge thing in the lake.

This was their bush maze and water park in the background. Unfortunately it only open during summer though. We cheated through the bush maze.

The park had a handful of these old style buildings. Each one had the same exact things in it though- an oerpriced gift shop, a jewelrey stand, a write a poem with your name on parchment shop, snack shop, take your picture as the emperor thop... and so on.

ARRRRRRRR matey!

I always wish I had some old style cannons to play with. These were fiberglass though.

Later, my friend Anna met up with us (she was much more familiar with the park!) Back to the European castle to see a show called 'The Fragrant Concubine.' I was too busy falling in love with the dancers to really catch the story.

Ring toss.

Anna urged us to buy these. Really finely stretched sugar around peanuts sesame seed and coconut. It tasted a lot like a butterfinger.

Later we went to see a show and I volunteered Pearl in it. She ended up winning somehow and married the Emperor.

Another show later that night. It was a lot of dancing.

Later a show on the park's second pond where we saw the pirate ship.

They had a good number of really loud flash cannons. Not enough for my liking though. They brought back good memories of American 4th of July

The park was really different at night.

Anna and Pearl

The gang.

On the 23rd, we took buses to Qi Ao island, the place I walked to when my bike broke down. At the end of a little dirt road, there's a hidden beach and this large seafood restaurant.

We had some large clam like creature and fried noodles. Total damage was about $7. Not bad for a seaside restaurant.

The next day we got some great weather and went to Macau again. We took a shuttle bus to the Grand Lisboa casino, famous to Chinese people as the building that "looks like a cockroach."

Macau's a really neat place after hundreds of years of European and Chinese culture clash.

Can you spot the cockroach building?

Boom!

The Macau government building... designed by Mary Kay.

Pearl and the 1209 ft. Macau tower. Home of the worlds largest Bungee jump. I wanted to go, but I could think of much better ways to blow $230 in 15 seconds.