Christmas in Sanya, South China's Hawaii :)

A group of four of us, Derick, Kirsten, Jeanette and I, flew to Sanya, South China early in the morning on Christmas Eve.  A few months earlier we'd all made these plans together.  Some of us were wanting to get out of town and simply forget Christmas this year without our loved ones near, and Jeanette was having a milestone birthday the day after Christmas.  So this trip was dubbed "The Christmas That Wasn't and 30th Birthday Blowout!"  This girlie just wanted to get her a$$ in the water and toes in the sand, and pay a little tribute to the Zac Brown Band :)  I took so many pictures in four days, I'll let them tell the story...

So, as I mentioned, Sanya Beach is known as the 'Hawaii of the
Orient.'  It was looking like Hawaii with this giant pineapple plaza.
Sometimes those Chinese architects are just outrageous :)

                                               

One thing I will say about China, is EVERYBODY has a job.  Outside of the
heavy equipment like dozers, cranes, and wrecking balls, all other labor
here is done by hand.  Sewer line needs replaced in the apartment complex?
There will be a whole contingent of laborers with their own pick axes and shovels.
No kidding, they carry their own tools to work.  (I would choose the leaf blower :)
Here a crew was all along the boulevard digging up the foundations for
new utility poles to be installed.  I loved that here in South China
the workers were wearing hats like you might see in Vietnam.

We landed in a small airport and had about a thirty minute ride to our
'deluxe hotel accommodations'. Actually, the Sanya Backpackers Hostel
was perfect- we were just two blocks from the beach and right in town
where all the restaurants and action was to be found- perfect :)
Seriously, though, we had a private en suite room which was great.
We didn't have to stay in a dorm with 10 others, and it still was just $22/night.
The owners were awesome, and we met such cool people who also
'have backpack, will travel'.  That's just how this girlie rolls- one backpack :)

As soon as we got checked in, we dumped our gear and headed
for the beach.  It was cool and overcast, but we were anxious
to see the view, and we were hungry for some fresh seafood.
They have some very strange Christmas decorations in China...

...because nothing says 'Christmas' like a bunch of Chinese lanterns and Co^^ie flags!

If that doesn't put you in the Christmas spirit, maybe a creepy Santa
with his tongue hanging out and an Indian dot on his forehead will
make you want to don a cap and say , "Ho! ho! ho!"
China is just so weird sometimes, I can't help but giggle.

Which is why Jeanette and I put on our reindeer antlers
(or moose horns) to take a stroll on the beach.
In China, anything goes.  I mean ANYTHING.

See?!  I mean ANYTHING goes!  I have no words for this...

There's just something about grown Chinese people frolicking in the waves
with oversized kiddie beach toys...how can  you not laugh at this?!

I looked up from my beach chair, and O M G, there
sat a grown a$$ man smoking a cigarette, and drinking
a beer IN WATER WINGS!  How can you not laugh at that?!

I couldn't help myself; I ran right over and had to have my picture with him :)
Then true to Chinese form, all of his friends, neighbors, and relatives came
over with their cameras and iPhones to snap pictures of the green-eyed laowei.
It was fifteen minutes of laughing, smiling, and playing charades.
I was laughing and pointing to his water wings, to which he proceeded
to give me a 'gun show'- which only made me laugh harder!!!
Now I had a grown a$$ Chinese man poppin' a bicep in his water wings!
That's some funny sh*t, right there!

Seeing Bruce and Scooter beach combing in the surf in their
'matching outfits' about sent me over the edge ;)

We enjoyed a tasty lunch on the beach- and so far the vacation was off to
a fabulous start.  It just needed to be about 10 degrees warmer with blue skies.

This was my view from our table at the restaurant.  I love seeing
sailboats at anchor in a harbor...makes me want to be on one of them.
If you look closely behind the motor yacht, there's a submarine at anchor!
You don't see one of those everyday :)

This couple was just too cute; I had to snap a pic.

and dem' Chinese babies are soooo cuuuuute!

Now, the Chinese, they love to snap pictures....of themselves....repeatedly....posing in all sorts of awkward, contrived positions....  It was just comical walking down the beach, watching them.

This looks natural, right?

Or this pose, with the selfie stick?

                         

                                    Or the one in the hat?  Or the other one
                                    frolicking in the surf with her scarf
                                   blowing in the breeze :)

Or this one- she had a whole crowd gathered to take her pic!  Such silliness.

Christmas morning Jeanette and I treated ourselves to brunch, then headed to the beach.

It was at least a little warmer, mid-70's, but still cloudy.

Jeanette and I were hoping to go scuba diving this trip.  It's all we talked about for months.
She had gone diving in the Philippines when we flew there in November.
Well, we went to no less than five different dive shops, and none of them had a dive master
 that could speak English.  At the last shop, they pointed to their sign and said 'English'.
 People, read this sign!  It's mostly Chinglish!  It just did not seem like a safe idea
to have a language barrier with a dive master.  I didn't feel like a game of charades
sixty to eighty feet underwater. We decided we best not chance it.

I looked up from my beach chair, and this guy looked like
he was using a tuning fork on this other guy's ear.  Whaaaatttt?!

I'll be danged; you CAN get your ears tuned up!  I'll pass, thank you.
My mother told me to never put sharp instruments in my ears.

Instead, Kirsten and I decided to build a sandman,
it was Christmas Day, afterall.

And of course, the Chinese beachcombers never miss a photo op :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM SANYA BEACH, SOUTH CHINA!

That evening we ordered pizzas in, and watched my favorite
Christmas movie...can you guess?  I had to keep at least one tradition alive :)

Dining out is interesting fare- you pick your fish,  crab, lobster, squid, eel, sea cucumber, and other strange
creatures from an aquarium, hear them club it in back of a tent, and then it appears on your table
in about 20 minutes with all the Chinese trimmings.  Don't worry Ellen, I could never choose a
puffer fish like your baby Tyson for dinner :/

The day after Christmas, we hopped on a crowded city
bus to go to the Yalong Bay Tropical Paradise Forest Park.
No matter where you go, all modes of transportation in China
 are crowded.  Except for maybe a yak.  You can't pile too many
Chinese people on a yak.

We all chipped in for Jeanette to ride an ostrich for her 30th birthday.  Seriously, how many
 people can say they rode an ostrich for their birthday?!  Happy Birthday, Jeanette, you've
become a treasured friend already.  Here's to your next thirty years, pretty lady!
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFwKen080XY

These next photos of me feeding an ostrich are hysterical-  My faces! lolllzzzz

Please be gentle....

Oh, God, is he gonna bite?!

I can't understand what you're saying....

...but are you sure this really is safe?!  Does it hurt?!

Oh. My. Good. God.  Pleeeeeeease don't eat me!
Seriously, what is up with my face???  I don't even know....

Must get back to my happy place, among the orchids :)

Because here, in the park, I shall cherish every tree and piece of grass
which entertains me to joy and happiness.  Chinglish makes me happy :)

And Chinglish signs with pictures?!  Even better!  How can you not sit
on the throne, look up at the door, ponder a sign like this, and NOT crack up?!
Sadly, I had to wipe the shoe prints off the seat before I sat down.
The former attendant violated picture #1.
And to think I used to b***h about the seat being left up...
There's been a rising evolution to my bathroom b***hing since I moved to China.

Jeanette needed a little liquid encouragement before she
walked across the swinging bridge- her fear of heights and all.
I found it curious that there was a bar next to a swinging
bridge.  In the US, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

How about Jeanette's frozen smile?! 

I thought the view was amazing, you could see clear down to the
ocean and Yalong Bay.  I'd take a swinging bridge over feeding
an ostrich ANY day of the week- no beer involved.

We strolled through some beautiful gardens...

And a misty rain had settled in briefly at the top of the
mountain.  It added to the Chinese ambiance. 

We opted to not take the city bus back, but hailed a taxi
instead.  I sat shotgun, and was in awe of this guy's
thumbnails.  Many Asian men will have a long pinkie
nail or thumbnail.  It is a sign of socioeconomic status
in their culture, an indication that the person does not do
manual labor.  There are hundreds of millions of manual
laborers here in this country, as I mentioned earlier.
He did have pretty nails, but I would not want them touching me!

We had a serious hankerin' for some western food, and we ended
up at this sports bar that was recommended by our hostel host.

The birthday girl got her birthday wish- margaritas
and a Western burger and fries :)  So tasty....

Sanya Beach is an interesting place.  Though it is in the
southernmost part of China, it has a very large Russian
influence, because the island basically developed
through tourism- catering to wealthy Russians as a
vacation hot spot.  There were many Russians on holiday.

I expected to see signs in Russian and Mandarin when we
went to Harbin, China, over the New Year holiday for the
Ice Festival.  It is very north in China, near the Russian border
and Siberia.  I just didn't expect to find Russians in Sanya.
It made for interesting sightseeing and people watching :)
Most every Russian man I saw had a huge beer gut
and a bulbous nose- all that Russian vodka, I suppose.

It was well after midnight, and we were walking back
to our hostel.  True to China form, there are people
working around the clock.  China is always in a state
of flux, and under construction.  An entire crew was
demolishing and renovating what was obviously a
clothing store.  They were pitching pieces of
mannequins out onto the sidewalk- photo op :)))

For our last day in Sanya, we signed up with this Aussie to
take a hike through a mountain village up to a waterfall.  Since
scuba diving in Sanya was a bust, we were especially looking
forward to this hike.  We had heard of squatters villages all over
the country, people who are 'unregistered', and are eeking out
an existence in a self-sustaining way.  This is the sort of thing
I love about traveling to new countries and cultures.

Check out his 'hiking shoes'!

As we hiked our way up the mountain, we came to the village which is a former Japanese Naval encampment.  Hainan
Island was under Japanese rule in the second world war, making Sanya the home port to the Japanese Imperial Navy.
Now the decrepit barracks are homes to about 100 or so Chinese villagers.   They are all 'unregistered', meaning
there is no record of their birth, and no accounting of them in the census.  The impoverished conditions they
live in was very sobering to take in and absorb.  

The mirrors on the doors are to ward off
evil spirits.  It is believed if the 'evil one'
were to see his reflection in a mirror, he
would flee and not enter in to their home.

Likewise, we saw many 'boxes' along the dirt road where chickens
were sacrificed...it is a common tradition to make a sacrifice every 12 days.

It was a very sobering sight with kids playing among the
feral pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, rats, and filth.

In spite of the living conditions, they are self sustaining, essentially cut off
from the outside world. They farm the valley in mostly rice paddies.

They harvest the fruit trees like papayas, mangoes
and coconuts...

They grow banana trees...

They catch fish in the reservoir, and use the damned water to flood their rice paddies.
We hiked along side the reservoir, as we made our way up the mountain...

...to their main 'cash crop'...groves of betel nut palm trees, carefully irrigated and tended to.
These betel nut groves account for 95% of Hainan's national crop.
Here's an article about the industry:

They live in mud encased bamboo huts, while they work the betel nut trees.

The towering palms were beautiful

This is what they harvest and sell.  Betel nut.  It dates back thousands of years
all throughout South East Asia.  The nut, with a piece of leaf, and lime, is
held in the side of the mouth and chewed.  It causes you to salivate like
crazy, and your saliva turns red.  You see red spittle all over the sidewalks
in South China.  I noticed it in Thailand and the Philippines, too.  People
will smile, and their mouths and teeth are stained red from the betel nut.
Sometimes their teeth are completely decayed, and they can have a 'glazed
look about them.'  It's said to have stimulating effects, similar to a cup of
coffee, yet others describe feeling high, and then wanting to sleep.  Like
 chewing tobacco, it is linked to causing oral cancers.  It is not a controlled
substance however, and it is readily available from vendors on the street.

We continued our hike up the mountain...

Where we had a beautiful view, just sitting in nature :)

And the only sound was a waterfall rushing over the mountain rocks

I have been all over the world, and I will NEVER pass
up an opportunity to stick my head in a waterfall!

  

...or to play in the water with a stranger I don't know,
who was wearing only his boxer shorts and a smile :)

Soaking wet, climbing rocks, in a beautiful place- Happiest Girl in China right there :)

Selfie time!

As always, we met such fascinating people, from all over the world.
I love hearing people's stories of where they come from,
how they got to this moment in time, and where they are headed to next.
Listening to people's stories is like food to my soul.  We are all connected.

Something I have become more acutely aware of, since I took off for China on my own a few months ago, is that people are simply people.  There's nothing to fear in leaving home; in fact, there is so much to be gained.  When you are stripped down of your creature comforts, your support network, your daily habits and routines, and your 'home base'...you suddenly gain a deeper awareness of self, and you are forced to simply BE in the moment.  We spend so much of our time in our heads.  We have this constant mind chatter that is always planning, organizing, mulling over past hurts, trying to make sense of our lives, stressing about the future....it's endless.  It's exhausting.  It's pointless, really, because it robs us of the beauty of the moment.  Much of the time it leaves us feeling depressed, or sad, or empty inside, because so much of that mind chatter is self critical.  Why do we spend so much of our waking energy stuck in this negative loop?

Stripped down, we get back to the basics, like really 'seeing' our surroundings, and becoming attuned to each life giving breath we take.  This is why I say I am the happiest girl in China.  It has been a painful process getting here.  I have friends and family who don't understand my motivations.  I am not sure I had an answer for them at the time.  But I realize now, how much we are burdened down by our own pain.  It took me leaving all of that behind, even if for a year or so, to gain a clearer, healthier perspective of my self and my life.  I was not happy where I was; and I was really stuck in the mind chatter.  

Please don't get me wrong. I loved raising my children, all five of them.  Though that time in my life was extremely chaotic and stressful in it's own right, just the busy-ness of a household of seven of us, I can say it was an especially happy time in my life.  I loved being a wife and mother. I loved creating a warm and safe home environment.  I loved cooking for my family.  I loved supporting the kids in their endeavors.  My ex and I were very involved in every aspect of our children's lives, and we all did a bang-up job.  We have five amazing children, who are all successfully making their way in the world, several with families of their own. But once that chapter of my life- 'motherhood'- was essentially over, and I was 'empty-nesting', I found myself caught up in the mind chatter more than ever.  As a result, I flipped my world upside down in a big way, before I came to China.  

Now, I am an eternal optimist at heart, and I have to believe there is goodness to be found in every situation and circumstance.  There are life lessons to be learned, and at fifty-one years old, I know I am not done with growing or learning.  What I want to learn now, more than anything, is simply a new way of BEING.  I want to choose happy, and I want to feel better about myself and my present situation or circumstances- whatever they may be.  I believe happiness is living, fully present, in the moment.  It is a new way of BEING.

So I say, people are just people.  No matter where you are in the world, look around you.  There are people in pain, people who are lost, people working, people who are absently existing, people who are in love, people who are laughing, people who are tired, people who are lonely, people escaping through addictions, and people simply going about their daily lives.  It doesn't matter if you don't speak their language.  We are all connected in our humanness- in our hopes and wishes and dreams. We smile, we laugh, we hurt, we cry- we are humans.  We really need to do a better job of attending to and caring for one another, and it begins with ourselves.  I have discovered that my mind chatter- my hurts, and defenses, and my own emotional baggage- keeps me from really living a life fulfilled. It is the humanistic therapist in me that wants a life truly fulfilled.  Holding on to any negativity is contraindicated to self-fulfillment.  So how does one go about finding that fulfillment?  I am not really sure, but I know that it all begins with being in the moment, and quite simply, smiling.  

I find myself smiling a lot in China, more than I have smiled in a very long time.  I smile at simple things, I smile at curiosities and things I do not understand, I smile when I wake up to a blue sky (which can be a rarity living in Beijing!), I smile when I enter the classroom, I smile on the subway, I smile at people walking their dogs, I smile every morning seeing grandparents walk their little grandchildren to preschool.  There really is much to smile about in this world.  

So these are the things I pondered, as I sat on the rocks, in the jungle, my hair soaking wet from the waterfall, and I listened to the people and their stories all around me.  Soon it was time to leave this moment, to put on my shoes, hike back down the mountain, and back through the village.  

And then, it was like I received confirmation from the universe, that I am right about this 'smiling and living in the moment' thing.  It was as if all the children in that broken down village came out into the street to see ME as we were passing through.  I crouched down to their level, smiled, and laughed, and invited them to play with me. 

  

 And there, you can see, is the happiest girl in China.

So while this trip began with the dread of my first Christmas away from home- 

my head filled with the mind chatter of my mistakes, and hurts, and shortcomings-

 of Christmas traditions blown apart... in a tiny village with children, I began to feel

 that veil of self-recrimination and self-doubt lift.  What an unexpected gift.

Life is beautiful.  

Each and every moment is beautiful.

So, I choose happy.

Jeanette and I placed our dot to signify 'home', and we caught a plane for our next adventure :)
The frozen tundra of Harbin, North China, here we come.