It’s been a while since I posted a blog entry, the reasons are numerous including enduring a horrific lockdown in Shanghai but this is not the place for that story. After the imprisonment, I mean lockdown, and the fact that we can’t travel overseas at the moment we decided to take a trip to Sanya in the south of China, our first holiday in three yeas since China shut its borders. We could have travelled to many places within China during that time but I guess we felt a bit aggrieved at the restrictions and we didn’t feel much like choosing from the limited menu available.
But enough was enough and we took the plunge. We packed our suitcases and off we went to Sanya, the most popular beach resort in China. We’re actually not beach people. Really? Yes we had to buy swim suits for everybody. We didn’t have beach towels of toys for the kids and as soon as we arrived realised we didn’t even have sunblock. But there were plenty of option available locally, although truthfully only the cheapest and nastiest tourist version available. On the second day we found a decent department store (possibly the only one in Sanya) and bought decent swimwear for the girls.
There’s not much of a city in Sanya, with limited modernity available, but it’s not why people go there anyway. I think the entire city had less than 10 coffee shops and the quality of food was very poor. We eventually found one restaurant where the food tasted great and ended up eating there daily. Most of the fare was catering to large drunken groups too inebriated to savour any flavour from the mountains of cheap seafood. And the best breakfast we could find was from McDonalds, a place we never frequent. But needs must.
We found a beach we liked and we stayed in a hotel and an apartment complex that both had fabulous swimming pools and more important paddling pools which both of my daughters loved. We only realised that during the holiday it was Hermione’s first ever experience with swimming as she’d actually never been on holidays, born into the pandemic era. It was quite a shock and a very different first three years than her older sister experienced, who’d been to Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam and all around China by that age. So next year we intend to fix that situation with a trip to Ireland and the UK to visit family and friends. Some of whom have never met either one or both of my daughters. But I’ll be posting many more blog entries before that.