At long last...

Leilei's last A level was Monday 19th June so I'd booked a ticket to go back to China on 20th. This time with his mate Nedas in tow. Luckily, I had sorted out Leilei's and my visas in good time and we both now have 10 year Q2 ones thanks to being family! The visa centre said if Tan wrote the invitation letter (as opposed to her brother who actually is in China) we could have 10 year ones instead of 5 or 2, and in fact didn't really give us a choice. But I'm not complaining if it means we don't have the kerfuffle of the application process for a long time. For some reason Xixi was only given a 2 year one even though they charged us for a 10 year before giving us a refund. Anyway she and Tan won't be coming till next month due to school. 

We arrived at Heathrow Terminal 4 at 5.30pm, 4h40m early in an attempt to avoid the rush hour, but we spent all the time on the Lizzie line standing up. There was no zone specified yet for this flight but I asked around to find it would be F, and when got there saw that check-in would start at 6.10pm which is a whole hour earlier than I'm used to, and we were near the front of the queue. At least I was. The lads had gone for a walk, but I saw the baggage people getting in their seats and I sensed they might open early. So I called Leilei to "hurry up!" and realised I sounded a bit Chinese but in this case I really meant it as they opened up while I was talking to him. So before 6pm the bags were dropped and we went to security where inevitably my liquids were searched for some reason I wasn't told and Leilei's bag was too. But five minutes later we were in the lounge without having to queue, and the boys went to eat while I watched the last half hour of the first Ashes game at the bar. Wow, what a test as Australia won by 2 wickets towards the end of the last day! Were England vindicated for declaring on day 1? I think so; it was brave and showed willingness to go for a result rather than a draw.

Lounge Lizards

After three hours of relative decadence (for an airport) we all removed a couple of cans of lemonade (no sugar-free unfortunately) and went to board what would be my first flight for 4.5 months and Leilei's first for getting on for four years if you don't include my 30 mins pilot instruction course where the kids came along too. 

Well it was a pretty uneventful flight direct to Guangzhou, with mild turbulence as predicted by turbli.com (I can't believe I wasn't aware of this site till recently).

I was prepared for just about anything, and managed a bit of sleep with the help of some Phenergan, and didn't watch anything on the screen for the first time. No drama with suitcases after the firm landing either, and immigration went without a hitch and left me with a 27th entry stamp. 

It took a little time to sort it but we manage to scan our passports in order to receive a code for the airport wifi, where I was able to tell Tan and Nedas's mum that we'd arrived safely via Weixin. I wasn't able to tell the rest of the family though as Express VPN wouldn't connect, meaning no WhatsApp etc. I'd expressly bought Express VPN after not insignificant research about which VPNs would work here as I know there's been more of a crackdown since we were last here.

Finally back!

Another annoyance is that I can't pay by Weixin at the moment so to get a tube ticket to Guangzhou South train station I had to find somewhere to change my 50 kuai note into five tens as the machine only accepted 5s and 10s. Having said that it was only 9 kuai each for the 90 minute journey to Shi Bi stop, close to the hotel that Chuan Chuan had kindly booked for us. We had our first negative China moment when we had to change lines after five stops. I told the lads that probably loads of people would be getting off as they were concerned about getting their suitcases to the doors as we were in the middle of the carriage. I was right about people getting off, but even more people were getting on. This was even more aggressive than I've seen before, people getting on literally pushing people getting off back into the carriage. We were not going to miss our change so I shouted "there are still people getting off!" as I'd done a few years back when trying to get off a train. But these people were relentless so I lied and shouted "there are young children trying to get off!". It was a bloody nightmare but a combination of that plus physical force from us and others just about managed to get us out of that carriage and for once I didn't mutter under my breathe but said out loud "such lack of manners!", but I don't think anyone cared. 

As we got out I saw that Line 2 was on the other side of the same platform we were standing on, but Nedas just followed the majority of the people going on the up escalator. No problem, he'd realise what he'd done and come straight back down the down escalator wouldn't he? No, of course not. He wasn't back after three minutes, and without any means of communication I sent Leilei to find him while I looked after the luggage. At least four trains we could have taken came and went and the 10 minutes they were away felt like three times that. But they finally came back from a different part of the platform, meaning it wasn't a simple case of doing a 180 turn and coming back down. 18 year-olds....

Outside the tube station we were hit by a wall of humid air and we got our unmistakeable first hit of southern China. We could have chickened out and got a cab or two but I'd asked a worker in the tube station where the hotel was and he showed me on his phone. It looked close so I took a snap of his screen and we successfully navigated the 750m or so to the 维多利亚hotel for a simple check-in before heading outside for a lovely al fresco evening meal. I also ordered a couple of Li Quan bottles for the first time in years, and for the first time in my life I ganbei'd with Leilei (and Nedas). I left the lads to go on a walk and went back with two boxes of doggy bag food (doggy boxes?), which I was pretty sure wouldn't be accompanying us to Pingguo. 

The hotel had two separate bedrooms and another bed in the main area. More importantly it also had wifi. Of course the first thing we did was try to get the VPN working but it was a bit hit-and-miss. Nedas managed to connect to Japan and I managed Singapore but with mixed results - at least WhatsApp worked though, even if many sites wouldn't load. Moving on to the laptop, Express VPN wouldn't work but for some reason my Pure VPN browser plug-ins appeared to work fine, and I'd not seen any mention of Pure in my VPN research. So I was fairly satisfied with that and optimistic we'd have some connectivity in Pingguo.