Severe Culture Shock and something else

I don't even know where to begin about today. I think we are in a severe state of culture shock and are ready to come home.  It is very difficult not knowing what is planned for you and how to prepare for anything. We were told last night that we were going to Sanya today and to dress for hot weather and to meet in the lobby at 7am for breakfast.  Our host met us and mom and I decided to decline breakfast as it was greens and meat and etc which make me and mom want to puke and so we met the group at the end of breakfast to board a mini bus to take us to the bullet train. While in the bus mom tried to find out a bit of our schedule for the day and while in Haikou and we discovered that we are not leaving like we were supposed to on Wednesday but rather tomorrow afternoon! Yikes! Mom and dad are supposed to teach tomorrow at the hospital here and then we leave for the airport.  So we arrive at the bullet train, we are given our tickets and we go up towards the track where at least 1000 people are pushing and shoving their way through the ticket area and onto the train. At least we had seats as there were many people standing.

  
We stand out very much and everyone stares at us so a few kids on the train could not help themselves from staring because they had never seen Americans before.  We arrived in Sanya and got onto a minibus and spent the next hour driving to a Buddhist monastery that everyone in our group was very excited to see called the Sanya Nanshan Cultural Tourism Zone. It was unbelievable- not in the fact that it was nice or different or even beautiful, but more because there must have been 2000 people there! There was no room to move, breathe, take any photos and it was a complete junk show/ tourist trap. No where we would ever normally go.
We walked in after waiting for our guide to get us tickets and then we had to wait to buy more tickets to take the shuttle around the gigantic complex. We got on the shuttle thinking we would go see a temple or something equivalent and 10 minutes later we got off and were told we were having lunch.

Mom and I were not hopeful that the food would be edible, but we walked into a massive cafeteria and got some food from a buffet line and it was actually really good. All vegetarian. We ate a fair amount including rice and then got up and were told to get on the shuttle again to go to the big Buddha which they said was like the statue of liberty. Ugh.
We arrived at the gigantic statue and wow it was huge, not very pretty and our tour loved it. We were not impressed. This whole tourist monastery was built by the government to help promote more tourism to the area. Its only 5 years old.   We didn't even go closer to the Buddha and then we walked back to the entrance and found our bus amid the super chaos.

30 minutes later we arrived at some beach that was supposedly thenicest white sand beach in all of China called the Tianya Haijiao scenic area where as the story goes there are two rocks in the water representing husband and wife and they will walk to the end of the earth together. That symbolism was the nicest thing in the whole area.  There were so many people everywhere on the beach, walking and starring at the rocks that I really did not get why this was supposed to be nice.  Apparently it is the southern most part of China and so people flock here just for that. We walked about a mile to a big rock that said end of scenic area in Chinese on it and then walked back to the bus. We walked about 5 miles today.

The bus ride was certainly interesting as they drive very fast here, there seems like there are no road rules and people just pass an honk all the time. We almost hit two mopeds- one with a dad and two kids on it that were crossing in the middle of oncoming traffic.  The way of life here is definitely different.

I am too tired to talk about the rest of the trip for the day, but hopefully I can write more on our flight tomorrow.  Every time we talk to someone about our itinerary, it is different, so its quite frustrating.  We may not have internet for the next few days, so it may be a little bit before I can post again.

Also, the last two days of posts were written on my blackberry soplease ignore the spelling/grammar issues.