Amanda and I spent 15 hours in Wuhan, the biggest city in central China. It was an interesting experience :) This is what happened, it’s a bit long but it was quite a night:
- We arrived and made it through customs at midnight with a 24 hour transit visa
- The only way to get to the city center an hour away at night was via taxi
- Basically no one speaks English to help us find an ATM
- Once we find an ATM it won’t read any of our cards and the money exchange centers are closed
- We try to get a taxi to take us to a different ATM and to our hostel in the city center
- They can’t read English characters which is how we have the address and name of our hostel written
- We find a nice Chinese friend who used to live in America, she can’t translate the address into Chinese characters and doesn’t know where it is
- We realize the free wifi works but just all Google websites and apps are blocked in China
- We find our hostel on a map!
- We find a different ATM at the other terminal! One of them eats my ATM card, but we get money with Amanda’s
- We get a taxi, a gruff old Chinese man who knows zero English
- I talk him down from 200 to 100 yuan, he’s not happy about it
- We drive around for over an hour talking/yelling with the taxi driver and pointing at maps a lot without much success
- We find our street! It’s dark with no businesses and lots of abandoned looking (but still lived in) apartment buildings, certainly no signs of a hostel.
- So we have him drop us off at a Holiday Inn nearby we drove past
- The driver demands more money, we give him the 100 yuan and hurry into the Holiday Inn as he yells at us
- Thankfully there is a very nice receptionist who tells us they have rooms and also gives us directions to the hostel we have booked, he says we’re close!
- We look for the hostel for 30 minutes with no success so we walk back to the Holiday Inn and get a room
- We get to our room at 4am and pass out in the most comfortable bed we’ve stayed in in months
- Then, we woke up, took some photos from our nice room view and jumped in a taxi to the airport which took about 90 minutes through traffic, showing us a glimpse into a bunch of the city
It was an adventure! We’re glad we did it but it could have worked out a little smoother. In general, the Chinese people were very friendly but the language barrier is intense. To a lot of people it seems like the English characters look just as foreign as Chinese characters look to us.
Well you made it home and that’s what counts!!!! Love you both!!