life in china: April 2016

This past weekend we headed to Yangshuo, China and wow it was the most insane trip with the funniest craziest stories I’ll probably ever have in my life. Are you ready for this?

So we took a sleeper bus to get there which is literally just a bus with a ton of beds on it that are a foot wide and five feet long. Definitely made for tiny Asian people. We left Thursday night and the bus drops us off on the side of the road at 4 am in Yangshuo so we head to the hotel and check in.

At about 9 am we went to the bamboo rafts to raft down the Li River. On the way there this kid threw up 7 times in his moms hand right next to me so that was absolutely disgusting.

Our river guide completely set us up…..So apparently they’re supposed to tell you you cant take your life jacket off but he didn’t so the Chinese police pull us over and totally yell at him and take his license and then he parks on the side of the river and is yelling at us in Chinese and showing us money and stuff. He literally would not go and we’re just stuck on the river bank. Then all of sudden he just starts going after like 30 mintues and he is on the phone yelling in Chinese so when we get back to the dock all his buddies are waiting and they are yelling and following us around and our tour guide translates and says he wants 3000 yuan which is like $400 from us to get his license back even though it was totally his fault.

So we try to call the police because they wouldn’t stop following us but the cops didn’t care because it was a small town and everyone is friends with each other. And we couldn’t just take a bus to leave because the bus driver was his friend so he told them not to take us anywhere. So eventually we had to pay him $200 to leave us alone it was insane. He told us he was going to have his friends fight us and find our hotel if we didn’t. gotta love china. So we finally leave there and try to go to this place called Moon Hill to hike it and we walked 6 miles in the wrong direction so we gave up on that and went to this Italian restaurant that had really good reviews but really ended up sucking.

The next morning we went and did another kind of bamboo rafts on the Yulong River which was 100x better than the other rafts. After that we headed to Western Street to look at all the little shops. We ended up getting fish pedicures while we were there. It was the weirdest feeling having fish eat all the dead skin off your feet.

That night we went biking and picked strawberries from some lady’s strawberry field. I’ll come back to the strawberries but they were the source of some serious pain within the next few days.

Sunday morning a few of us took a cooking class which was the coolest thing ever. It was the best Chinese food I’ve ever had and that’s saying something considering I’ve burned milk before.

Back to the strawberries…

Sunday night we were taking the sleeper bus back to Zhongshan where we live and all of a sudden around 1 AM 3 of us started violently throwing up. Someone had the bus driver pull over and we got off and just kept throwing up. Then our head teacher fainted four times and threw up and me, Rachel and Jami were laying on the ground at some random gas station in the middle of who knows where in China barfing our guts out at 2 AM. Within an hour I had thrown up 17 times. I called my dad and as soon as he answered I just completely lost it bawling. After about two hours the bus driver made us get back on and we drove the rest of the way home still throwing up on the bus and then we were taken to the hospital in Zhongshan.

No one likes the ER in the United States so just imagine how bad the ER in China is. Not a single doctor spoke English. One of our Chinese coordinators came and was our translator but she doesn’t speak the best English. When we get there they put us all on beds and stick IVs in our arms. They shoved that needle into my arm so hard I wanted to die right there. Then they moved us to another room and came to take blood samples. We were all absolutely hysterical because we cannot stop throwing up and we’re in a Chinese hospital which was totally scary and nerve racking and there were a million people in our room just yelling in Chinese and it was so hot. It was the perfect recipe for disaster. Some department of disease control in China came and interviewed us all about what we ate and such.

Unfortunately, it only gets worse. I fell asleep and was rudely awakened by a nurse trying to pull down my shorts….I kicked her as hard as I could…whoops. Our coordinator runs up looking so worried and says “No, no she has to take a sample from your….anus?” Through tears Elli and I died laughing. When I told my mom this she could not stop laughing and just said, “Well you’ll have a crazy story to tell that might be funny in a few weeks.”

Naturally this day just continues to get worse. After 4 different IV drips they finally gave me a shot in my butt that was supposed to make me stop throwing up but it didn’t work. All it did was leave a huge bruise. Then the doctor gave me three different pills to take and said I could take them without food even though we hadn’t eaten in 24 hours and had thrown up everything we’d eaten in days. Well let me tell you how wrong he was…I threw up my entire water bottle and all the pills about 30 seconds later. We were finally released to go home after 14 hours even though the doctors kept telling us it was a bad idea. I don’t think anything could’ve been worse than that Chinese ER though.

They eventually told us that the strawberries we ate must’ve had harmful chemicals in them and that they must not have been properly washed so basically we got the most miserable case of food poisoning from a stupid little strawberry.

This morning the girls who didn’t get sick had to go to a meeting over at the health department and they basically told them that having foreigners get food poisoning will make them look bad so they are officially chalking it up to a virus even though it’s a lie. Gotta love China.

The only good thing was that the Jacksons, a family in our branch, came and they brought chocolate, toothbrushes, etc. When Sister Jackson hugged me it was like having my mom there. She was honestly an angel sent from God that day. We got priesthood blessings too which were so comforting.

The last few days are being chalked up to some of the roughest ever. But we’re home and on the mend and I will be avoiding Chinese hospitals for the rest of my life.