My Hotel

Traveling on a budget can take some work and my friends helped me a lot. They arranged a hotel for my stay that was reasonably clean, reasonably safe and reasonably cheap - about 250 RMB ($30.50 US) per night. It was one of those friend of a brother’s daughter’s friend that knew the cook at the restaurant where the 4^th floor maid’s uncle fixed the water kind of things; I never did get it straight, but networking and social capital are alive and well in Nanning.

If you go to China and stay in the 5-star western hotels, eat in the western restaurants and take a taxi everywhere, you may as well stay at home and watch a China travelogue on the Discovery Channel – not my cup of tea. That kind of travel might lead you to know China as a faraway version of the US with different-looking people outside the taxi window. In fact, there is no place on earth more different that the West than in China; everything is different and is done in a much different way here – everything. The beds are made up differently, there's a comb, fresh toothbrush and a miniscule tube of toothpaste in the room every morning, there's a 2-liter thermos of boiling water for drinking and making cha. The room is spacious, about 15 x 15 feet (4 x 4 meters), with a larger window overlooking the Yong Jiang river – the Missouri-river-sized Nanning waterway - and the city itself. There is a junkyard outside – the river people park their junks at the water’s edge here below my window. I call it the Xiyuan Marina and Yacht Club; what a view! The only thing missing is heat.

I sit at the desk and write with a long-sleeve shirt and 2 sweater vests on. I have instant coffee with Chinese-labeled Coffee-Mate to get my heart started and keep warm. It is about 40 degrees F in Nanning; very cold, damp and rainy here in winter. The Chinese are hard and frugal people. Rather than heat their buildings for the 2 cold months of the  year, they tough it out by adding sweaters and more clothes for a few weeks. Climate control is oriented toward the 8 miserably hot months in this tropical jungle. We are only about 100 miles (130 km) from Vietnam, after all. Despite the cold, I think it is better for me now than in the hell-like summer. I can put on more shirts, but could only take off so much clothing without some kind of governmental or  military response from the Chinese.