Spring Break Part 3: Guilin 桂林

The first picture is a picture that I took of the Li River, and the second picture is all 6 of us on the bamboo raft on the Li River.

 

Jess, DD and I arrived in Guilin at 8 am on Wednesday, May 5^th in a parking lot/shopping square full of convenience stores, restaurants, and hotels. After asking for directions, we finally found our hostel down an alleyway lined with restaurants. We checked in and happily found out that we were given a room with 2 bunk beds, but we had the room to ourselves. Yay! I called Kevin (my classmate from last semester who now goes to Guilin Normal University) and we arranged to meet up at the train station at 10:30 am. Jess, DD and I took much-needed showers (we hadn't showered since before hiking the day before) and then I ate my first bowl of mifen. Actually, at the time I didn't know that I was eating this super specialty dish that I saw on signs in every single restaurant. I thought I was just eating noodles. Mifen means "rice noodle" and there were a ton of restaurants in Guilin that served this dish for around 4 RMB. It's a bowl of noodles with a few pieces of meat on the top, and then on the side you can add your own "condiments", like spices, onions, peppers and other flavors. It was quite good actually.

 

So I met Kevin at the train station, and then we went back to the hostel to get Jess and DD. When we were riding the bus to a park in Guilin, Kevin goes: "Every once in a while someone will sit in the fake ticket booth they have at the entrance and try to make you pay an entrance fee. But don't worry, you don't actually have to pay, they just try to make tourists pay sometimes." So when we got to the park, we started walking through the gate entrance and a woman came running out of the ticket booth and stopped us. "Tickets! Tickets!" she yelled. Luckily, Kevin saved the day by being like, "Um, I go to this park all the time and I've never had to pay. We all go to Guilin Normal University." Without putting up too much of a fight, the woman let us go in for free.

 

Jess and DD were exhausted from hiking in Zhangjiajie and in Dehang, so Kevin and I decided to hike up a small mountain they had in the park, while Jess and DD decided to walk around the lake. As we climbed the mountain, I caught Kevin up on the latest CIEE gossip, namely that Pingping is pregnant, Tangle is coming back to work for CIEE after "failing" the Beijing University Ph.D. interview process because the son of a CEO of a major international company in Hong Kong cut in, and how all of our friends from last semester were doing. Kevin himself was taking classes at the university, as well as teaching English to over 200 kids at a middle school and high school in Guilin.

 

He had just been fired the day before though! Turns out that the Guilin police are really prejudice against all black people, since some Africans have been coming into China and dealing drugs. The Guilin police had recently done a drug bust that had involved some Africans, and as a result, they were investigating every black person that lived in Guilin. Kevin's friend and co-worker at the middle school was an African-American and the police had been investigating him for the past couple weeks, including following him around. One Friday, they even followed him to a bar, and after he had drank a little bit, the police came in and asked him what he was doing in China. He said, "I'm here teaching English," which was a big mistake because he only had a student visa. So the police started investigating the school where he and Kevin worked at. The school told Kevin that they had to fire him and his friend, since now the school was under investigation as well, and both of them only had student visas. Apparently, the school told Kevin that he was fired and that his African-American friend was a drunk and a thief and Kevin shouldn't be friends with him anymore.

 

 Kevin was in the CIEE A class last semester, which is the class that I'm taking this semester. So I have the teachers now that he had last semester, so we talked about their silly mannerisms and the way that they conducted class. It was weird though, because it sounded like the teachers definitely changed some of the teaching styles since last semester. When we got to the top of the mountain, the view was beautiful. It was a little foggy so we couldn't see to far. "This view is really underwhelming," Kevin said.

 

We hiked back down and called DD to find out where they were. "We are by all the singing," she said. "Just keep walking by the lake and you'll see us." As we walked, we heard some singing and saw Jess and DD sitting at a picnic table with about 6 old Chinese people. Kevin and I walked over and the old people offered for us to sit down and eat some of their food. Kevin and I both can't sing, so we just sat and listened while Jess and DD sang "There ain't no mountain high enough." After that, the old people sang a Chinese song for us and then we left. After that, Kevin showed us his gym that he calls the "Porno Gym" that had pictures of huge muscular and sometimes even naked people on the walls. "I wish you guys could see the men's locker room," Kevin said. "It has even more pornographic pictures on the walls."

 

We walked to Kevin's university campus and ate some tianbao, which are steamed buns with a really sweet fruit flavored sauce inside. After that we got lunch at a stir-fry place where you just pick out a ton of vegetables and they make a stir-fry for you for less than 10 RMB. Pretty awesome! We got some milk-tea after that and then headed to an area outside the city go on a walk/hike. After walking for less than 10 minutes from his campus in the city, we found ourselves in an extremely rural area that looked like it came right on the 1940s. Dirt roads, abandoned shacks with phone numbers and "For Rent" spray painted on the side, political graffiti, rice paddies and other crop fields, livestock and houses that looked like they were about to fall apart. In the background, the beautiful views of Guilin's famous scenery were visible. It was nice to escape the pollution, noise and dirt of the city center in Guilin. We walked down a dirt road for an hour or two, chatting mostly about our study abroad experiences and comparing this semester to last semester (we do that a lot these days). Jess and DD told Kevin about this semester's experiences, and Kevin and I told them about all the crazy shenanigans about last semester. We talked about first impressions, and they can be so wrong sometimes, and how they change so dramatically over the course of a semester.

 

After a while, we realized that we had to turn around, so we headed back towards Kevin's campus. We got a cab back to our hostel and Kevin went home to rest and do some errands. When we got back to the hostel, we got a call from Vince and Lahela, who were coming in to Guilin by train that day from Chengdu (a 26-hour train ride). So we went to go pick the two of them up and we all bought our train tickets back to Nanjing. After Vince and Lahela showered, we went to Kevin's apartment and then got Korean food. We then went and walked along the lake in Guilin, which was a pretty beautiful sight. Vince caught Kevin up on all his news from this semester. We went back to the hostel, shared a bottle of wine, played pool and passed out in our beds. The next morning, Kevin came to our hostel around 9:00 am and we checked out of the hostel. We would spend the day heading to Yangshuo on various forms of transportation, including taking a bamboo raft down the famous Li River.

 

So we went outside and got a bus to the Li River, where Kevin bargained with a man who said he would take us on the river for only 200 RMB.  Although it was raining, he just kept saying over and over how the weather was perfect for riding a boat on the river. After catching another bus, we made it to the Li River and the six of us got on a bamboo raft. We felt lucky about this because Kevin said usually the rafts only fit 4 people. The man was right: it wasn't too hot and the view was fantastic that day, and it wasn't raining very hard anymore, instead a mist of fog covered the mountain peaks, making the view incredible. We floated down the river for a few hours, just sitting, enjoying the peacefulness and relaxation and taking pictures.

 

When we arrived at our destination, we took a golf-cart type vehicle to another small town along the Li River. "You have to be really brave to sit on the outside," Kevin said. Kevin was our tour guide slash leader for the day since he had already done the trip. "I'm brave!" I said, and sat on the outside. Along the way, I nearly fell out of the car about 3 times, it was incredibly bumpy and rocky, but fun. When we arrived, we had lunch and had some Beer Duck, a specialty in the region, as well as some other food. The highlight of the meal were the carmalized apples we got at the end. Not hard, sticky carmeal, but carmel that was still warm and soft. We had to eat the apples as soon as we could before they became hard like cement. We walked around the town for a little while and shopped, I bought a dress and some postcards and my friend bought a cute bag that looked like an owl.

 

Then we caught a bus to Yangshuo, where there was an Australian family with 3 blonde kids who kept us entertained by telling us jokes and saying things like, "My dad has 10,000 nose hairs but I don't have any!" To be continued in Yangshuo…

 

Pictures to go along with this blog post below!