Patricia and Andre’s RTW Adventure

I wanted to make a new category for gross stuff but it follows after all the regular blog…….this is just a little bit of behavior that disgust us and we thought we needed to share with you……….I don’t know why I instantly thought about my mom when it came to making this new entry but I don’t want her to be reading this and enjoying her morning coffee and then come across what I am about to describe……so mom, if you’re reading this, please finish eating and then continue….you have been warned. 

The horking has GOT TO STOP…… yes, I said horking!  It is, by far the most disgusting thing we have had to experience on this whole trip.  It’s worse than the squat toilets without doors, worse than bits of chicken laying around on table tops while we try to eat our lunches, worse than the sewer gas that has pentrated our nostrils since we landed in south east asia.  We heard about what to expect here in China with the pollution being so  intense and people needing to clear their “nasal passageways” to put it nicely, but COME ON!!!!!!  There has got to be a quiet solution!  Nothing in the world can really describe what it’s like.  You can tell about 15 seconds before the actual finale that it’s about to happen and if you think that you’re too close to the horker, well, you move to a safe place, unless of course, they’re sitting right behind you in a cramped bus that you have to be on for the next 12 hours.  It starts with the low growl, a pause and then the final HORK.  Right on the street beside you, on a bus floor beside you and on the floor of the restaurant in our hotel we ate at when we arrived in Wuhan………..anywhere, anytime.

As a small aside to the horking, when we arrived in Hong Kong a couple of days ago (yes, the current blog entry doesn’t match up with the current time, sorry) we were overexcited at the possibility of no horking, people actually getting into line ups for things and not littering.  I have to say that on the most part we have not been disappointed.  Getting to Hong Kong almost landed Andre in the hosiptal or jailhouse though.  You see, there’s a bottle neck at the entry point of the train station where they want everyone to dismount all they have, place it through the x-ray machine and then pick it up on the other end.  No problem, right?  Well, in a country where overpopulation means that you may not get your turn, I guess, bottle necks are probably by far the most dangerous thing they have in a place like China and 1.2 billion people.  At the hand of about 6, 80 year old ladies Andre was shoved and shoved and almost thrown off balance as he tried to get the 20 kilo bag off his back to put through the x-ray machine.  He ultimately just put his entire weight into a spin and let centripedal force do the rest.  These little old ladies moved back for about 1 minute and then started the shoving match all over again!  Security guards looked on, smiled and did nothing.  Andre had a good description of the whole epsiode as we later just stood and watched in horrified fascination – it’s like how rats behave at the bottleneck of a sinking ship – they just crawl over each other, shoving and pushing to get through.  By far this was the weirdest behavior we have seen and we try to stay away from the chaos but it is unavoidable in a train station where I think they set up the bottlenecks for fun and see how the toursist react!  Maybe they were late for their train?  HA!  We have seen this happen in too many places too many times to afford that luxurious excuse!

Back in Hong Kong, we were starving after looking for a place to sleep and after paying way way too much for our place (I’ll get to that one in another post!), we ended up eating at Mc Donald’s……..and in the middle of our eating, there it was, the start of that low growl associated we have heard way too many times in the past month and could only mean one thing – our eyes met over our burgers we were previously eating so happily, we both knew what the other was thinking and prepared to get up to leave.  Then that low growl turned into a burst of noise we quickly recognized as the cappuccino machine!  How sweet the sound!

Tags: sensory overload?, Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 5:19 am and is filed under sensory overload?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.