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Due to a forced schedule change because of the tides our cruise on the Yangze (or Yangtze or Yangzi, etc) was upgraded for free from a Three-Star to a Four-Star.
We were excited. Although Dragon warned it was still local style.
With that warning in mind we headed towards the clump of boats moored together. In China they clump the boats together so you have to walk through them to get to your boat.
There were two that could've been our. One a beautiful luxurious looking boat. One which looked like it would be lucky to make it out of the Yangze in one piece.
We walked towards the nice one - yes!
We turned and went towards the dingy one - that's ok, I can swim.
We turned again and actually go into the nice one - yes, yes, yes! Oooh the rooms look really nice. I've never been on something this nice.
We kept walking all the way through to the next ship - i let out a disappointed sigh.
It was still nice, but just as it had been dwarfed in size by the other cruise ship so was it dwarfed in comparison to the other ship's luxury and decadence.
Well that wasn't what I went to China for anyway. I went to see the real China.
And that's what we saw on our more humble cruise ship - or to be more precise we saw a bunch of real Chinese people who had saved up possibly for years to come on this cruise and were super excited to be here.
Apparently a way of showing excitement in China is to talk really loudly, I mean pretty much yell at each other. That was... interesting to listen to.
Luckily it didn't last too long.
Apart from listening to their rather loud conversations from afar, not that we could understand any of it anyway, we didn't really get to interact with any of the other passengers for the first two nights.
We shared the experience of sailing through the first and second gorges in the same space but separately.
We ate our meals in the same hall but completely segregated (to be fair, we had a special table with a slightly more Westernised version of the same food).
Even when Lauren dragged me up to sing Karaoke at the top of our lungs and completely out of tune (after the first night of listening to this from our room we quickly discovered it's better to be the one singing than the one listening) - even then, although there were some other passengers watching and taking photos, nothing we could do or say would convince them to come up and dance with us.
But on the last night we had the crew show and later dancing. Greg was picked from the crowd to be a part of one of the dances and everyone loved him. I volunteered to be in the drinking competition (orange juice) and came second but the guy who won gave me the prize anyway (a pack of post-cards).
During the dancing both Mel and I were dragged onto the dance floor.
I realised that as a group of foreigners it wasn't that people didn't want to talk to us, they were just shy. It wasn't too unlikely that for some people this was the first time they'd seen foreigners up close.
In the end we had a lovely time on the cruise, especially on the last night.
On our final day I woke up feeling unwell and was soon to find out that a queasy stomach was only the beginning of my problems that day.
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