I thoroughly enjoy coffee, but it does terrible things to my body. In fact, the only coffee I can drink that doesn’t leave me feeling utterly sick for the rest of the day is Starbucks. Does that make me a coffee snob? But you also have to take into consideration the atmosphere, and my wife and I both revel in the idea of hanging out at a coffee shop and using somebody else’s Wi-Fi for an hour or so. It’s no different when we’re traveling overseas. Starbucks is always a haven to us.

The prices don’t change much from country to country, though. My wife’s favorite drink (a green tea latte) costs about $5 in the US, China, and Thailand. For Thailand in particular, that’s an expensive drink. You can catch someone on the street selling iced coffee and Thai tea for as little as 50 cents a cup. Even the brand name shops like Coffee World and Amazon Cafe don’t mark up their prices that much. But my wife wasn’t able to find another shop that made a good green tea latte, so that’s still worth something.

However, all of the Starbucks we went to in Thailand didn’t have free Wi-Fi. Thailand is funny about its wireless Internet. That kind of service is surprisingly hard to come by, and apparently you can’t even rely on global establishments like Starbucks for it. Luckily, China doesn’t suffer from the same problem, but then the Internet in China sucks, anyway. I could never get a good connection at a Chinese Starbucks.

I know there’s this need/want to support and try out local shops while you’re abroad. Hey, I’m all for authentic food. But when it comes to drinks in between meals, I’m kind of complacent. While I did try a lot of coffee shops in Thailand, I gotta be honest… most of them were not very good. The best drinks are out on the streets, but where are you going to sit down to fiddle with your phone? As for China, most sit-down shops are also smoking shops. Starbucks is one of the few places in China that enforces its no smoking rules. I’ll pay $5 for a cup of coffee just for that.

I’ve done a lot of traveling in China and have stayed in several hostels and hotels across the country. After a few bad experiences, however, I’ve sworn off hostels completely and have become much more leery about the kind of hotels I book. True, I could just pay for a five-star pampering, but when do English teachers or unemployed travelers ever spoil themselves? While Ctrip and Agoda both have some standards with the hotels they list on their sites, you can’t always trust them. A couple of genuine stinkers have come out of Ctrip. There’s really only one name I feel like I can trust regarding budget hotels in China, and that’s Home Inn. In fact, I depend on Home Inn so much, I never know what to do if there’s not one in the area I’m going to be visiting. Seriously, for what you pay, they’re good hotels, and they’ve been pretty consistent from city to city. So if you’re wanting to do China on the cheap, but you don’t want to live in squalor, keep them in mind.

Last night for New Year’s Eve, we ate dinner with Sarah’s parents, grandparents, and aunt and uncle. I’m told that, in the past, this meal has been epically huge, but this year was a little more toned down. Truth be told… I didn’t even notice. It was still too much food for me. At 8:00, everyone went their separate ways to watch the national TV special in the comfort of their own beds. The importance of this TV special is probably similar to the importance of watching the ball drop in New York:

The closer we got to 12:00, though, the more fireworks we could hear outside. In fact, fireworks have been going off all day today and will most likely continue for the rest of the week. I remember the very first time I came to China, we caught the tail end of Chinese New Year, and the sound of firecrackers in the daytime made me feel like we had just landed in a war zone. Plenty of vendors were out on the streets yesterday, selling boxes of fireworks. Today, they’ve been replaced by people selling fruit baskets to bring to your relatives. I don’t think those explode, though.

It’s a new restaurant we stumbled across where you order as many meats and vegetables as you want, and they’ll fry it all together in a bowl with whatever level of spiciness you chose upfront. It’s seriously better than Hot Pot. But even with my rekindled love for Chinese food, I still can’t bring myself to eat chicken feet… or any hacked up chicken dish, for that matter. I finally concluded to my friend, after enjoying everything he ordered except the chicken, “I just can’t eat something that looks like it was prepared with a grenade.”

It was cheaper for us to stay in Zhangjiajie for a week than to try to come back early, but you don’t really need a full seven days to see the mountains. So we set out for a nearby, famously old town called Fenghuang. There are two ways to get to Fenghuang from Zhangjiajie: take a four-hour bus straight to the city or take a two-hour train to Jishou and then an hour bus to Fenghuang. We opted for the latter but missed the two-hour train by just a few minutes and got stuck on what is quite possibly the slowest effing train in the whole world. It had to stop at every little city along the way, and every time it did, the stench of the bathroom became overbearing. This was supposed to save us an hour of traveling but ended up taking four hours by itself. Man, I hate the slow train…

Once in Fenghuang, things calmed down considerably. This is the kind of place you go to to get away from the hustle and bustle of modern China. There are still plenty of touristy marketplaces there, but if all you do is hang out by the riverside, you’ll enjoy it. It’s quiet. The buildings are quaint. The food is great (including some of the best eggplant I’ve had anywhere). I quite liked strolling along the river and trying a new milk tea brand every night. However, nighttime there is a different story. That’s when Lady Fenghuang takes off her clothes, and you realize she’s a regular, old skank. Most of the buildings are actually KTV bars, and they’re quick to fire up the neon lights and bad singing as soon as the sun goes down.

As for the river, they say it used to be very nice, that people used to swim in it, but it’s too polluted now. You can gather as much just by looking at all of the garbage floating in it. But people still use the river for other things. I saw one lady washing vegetables in this “polluted” water while, just a few feet upstream, another woman was washing her clothes with a bottle of bleach. Farther upstream from her was, I kid you not, a guy peeing into the water. See, China, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Whenever I find out the weather is going to suck on my mountain trip, a part of me gets hopefully giddy at the thought of witnessing a sea of clouds gently swirling underneath the peaks. That kind of imagery is truly majestic and awe-inspiring. What ends up happening, though, is that I get stuck in the middle of a goddamn rain cloud! It’s hard to appreciate how steep this cliff is in such bad weather:

Tianmen Mountain is also home to one of windiest roads in the world with a total of 99 gut-wrenching turns. I’ll have to trust my stomach on this one, because, again, I couldn’t see anything out the window. I’m not sure how the driver was able to make it, either. Hmmmmm. I think I should have been more terrified. This road takes passengers to the bottom of a staircase that leads up to a giant hole in the mountain. In keeping with the 9 theme, it’s 999 steps to the base of the hole. We couldn’t see the hole from the bottom of the staircase, so I marched up all 999 wet, slippery steps to get a better look. Sadly, as I stood in front of this epic archway, I still could not see a thing!

That didn’t stop the photographers from trying to make a buck. They continued to offer to take your picture in front of the hole and would Photoshop it within minutes to make it look like you were there on a good day. Some tourists even had a jet added to the photo, flying through the hole at the exact same time the picture was taken. What a coincidence! But let’s not kid ourselves, people; we all know we got cheated that day.

Why is it so hard to see a Chinese mountain in good weather? I have such bad luck with this. Huangshan: foggy. Longqing: foggy and rainy. Tianzhu: foggy. Zhangjiajie: foggy and rainy. I was at that last one just a few days ago, and… wow, I forgot how much I hate touring in China. You think you’re going to have a nice walk through a canyon, but then every other guy on the trail is smoking and throws his cigarette butt on the ground along with all of the other garbage people couldn’t be bothered to carry for five more meters to the nearest trash bin. Considering how much they charge for a ticket into the park (258 yuan, or $40), they could at least hire a few “park rangers” to go around punching people in the face who don’t follow the rules. Seriously, it’s so bad…

I’m told Zhangjiajie is the second most expensive national park in China. Jiuzhaigou is the first. The difference, of course, is that Jiuzhaigou is worth it and is actually clean and well-maintained. Zhangjiajie, however, is very commercialized, to the point where asshole photographers have commandeered some of the better viewpoints and won’t even let you have a look unless you pose for their stupid pictures. They even renamed one of the mountains to “Avatar Floating Mountain,” because it was the peak that inspired the set design for Avatar, and now tacky Avatar posters are on display everywhere. Come on, it wasn’t even that great of a movie!

Okay… deep breath… Putting aside my frustrations with the weather and other tourists, the mountains in Zhangjiajie are pretty cool. It was nice to be able to walk along the bottom of them (alongside a pleasant stream, no less) for most of our first day there and then spend the rest of that day and all of next viewing them from the top. It’s a huge park, too, which is why your ticket is good for three days. There are many entrances and shuttle buses to deal with, so it can get a bit confusing where you’re supposed to go. Even my wife found it hard to read the maps. All of the signs that say don’t tease the wild monkeys? I think those wild monkeys are actually lost tourists who went native.

I’ve been to enough Chinese weddings to know that they are smoke-filled banquets with a loud MC and a groom who is not expected to walk out the door sober. I was looking forward to the getting drunk part but not the rest. Fortunately, our wish to keep things simple (as we did with our US wedding) was granted, and the MC only said a few words at the beginning before disappearing for the rest of the afternoon.

The actual ceremony consisted of us walking down the aisle, being introduced by the MC, greeting Sarah’s parents, and exchanging bows and glasses of wine. And oh, how there was wine… Sarah was smart, though, and switched me to orange juice before we’d toasted everybody at each table. Darn. I was really hoping I’d have to be carried out of there on a stretcher, but at least I was able to witness some of the other guests get violently plastered.

My biggest fear about doing a Chinese wedding, however, wasn’t that I wouldn’t understand what was going on but that I’d be trapped in a room full of cigarette smoke for two hours. With only eight tables of guests, though, the room didn’t fill up with toxic levels of smoke as anticipated. That was a huge relief. It also showed that, without the groom’s side of the family present, this really was a small and simple wedding. And I’m okay with that.