After 10 days in China, this trip is slowly winding down to its end, and I can only say that I saved the best for the very end.

Not to say that going to Fuzhou and Beijing with my Dad wasn't a great time or anything. Every moment in Fuzhou felt like an enormous gamble for life and death, between the taxi-rides, the dodgy food and boat ride up the river. And Beijing was great for some serious sight-seeing, my personal favorite being the Great Wall. But as the days went by the vacation seemed less like a nifty little excursion with my father than some sort of ridiculous romantic getaway for my dad and his girlfriend, with me as the third wheel. I know I'm being a brat, but it's difficult to see your own father fit into a stereotype you once reserved for goons. Trotting around with a northeastern woman, smoking and drinking around in enclosed spaces as if he didn't know better, all the while keeping his behavior under wraps when he's at home...  God it made me so mad. And sure she was nice to me, but you should have seen how she yelled at the waiters and waitresses. She held my hnad and treated me either like an old granny or a little kid, until I got really sick of her and just decided I would stop trying to act so pleased with seeing the two of them together and avoided talking to them altogether.

Yeah I know, I act just like a little kid. I guess the point is to be cool about it, but meeting my dad's girlfriends has never been a comfortable situation for me. Anyways, China's cool. I'm having a nice time. Everything is so big and there are tons of people. I can't think of anywhere I've visited more unfamiliar to me, where the rhythms are so out of sync with my own. Which is strange, because I'm Chnese after all. Finally I'm in HK with Karen where, even if this place is topsy turvy atleast Karen is a familiar site, purple hair and all.