Last Days in Guilin 桂林 (gway-leen)

Pagodas on the boat cruise in the urban part of Guilin
Old style architecture at the end of the boat cruise in the urban part of Guilin
Countryside of Guilin
Cave
(above: bamboo raft trip to get to the waterfall)


3rd Day

Thank God! On this day I was able to sleep in! The night befor ewe didn't return to our hotel room until about 12am. So everyone woke up around 10:30am and we started to drive to lunch at about 11:30am.

For lunch we had "Sour fish" which is a Chongqing style dish. Sour fish is prepared in a big pot on top of a stove cooker right at your table. Two fish are dropped into a soup of seasoning and vegetables, cooked, then picked apart and eaten. You spit the bones out onto your plat or the table. I found this very difficult because it requires eating the fish in the front part of your mouth and being able to spit out just the bones on to the plate. The Chinese have been doing it all their lives and are very good at this. After a while I got used to it, and began enjoying my food.

Soon after lunch we departed for another boat cruise in the city part of Guilin. At the end of the cruise was an old building complext that was built in the style of traditional Chinese architecture.
I want to see more buildings like these!

Next was a golfcart tour of Guilin's zoo/park. It is called 七星公园 (Seven Star Park). I was surprised to see that in this zoo the animals are given a lot of freedom, and boundaries are flimsy or just not there. However the park didn't have anything really dangerous like lions, tigers, or bears (oh my!).

4th and Last Day

My flight back to Chongqing with my host Grandpa wasn't until 10pm. So my host father had the two of us join a tour group to kill time until then. The rest of my family started driving back to Chongqing sometime after my host father dropped us off at the tour group's starting point.

This tour I enjoyed because we drove through the countryside of China the whole time! Fields and little villages passed by our window the whole way. I was entertained.

On the tour we were taken to a massive cave somewhere in the mountains of Guilin. But it was poorly preserved and people touched the cave way too much, so you could tell that the cave was dead. Anyone who knows about the preservation of caves would know what I am talking about. (When I went to Karchner Caverns they lectured us on this).

The cave was lit up with fancy rainbow lights and even had a train going through it so you didn't have to walk too much within the cavern.

Going to see a waterfall was the final item on our list, and to get there you we taken by bamboo raft. I was given the option to climb the waterfall but I wasn't wearing the right clothes and my host grandfather wanted me to stay with him. This tourspot advocated environmentalist to the fullest. There was a graveyard with all the extinct animals from China, a doorway with a mirror on the other side (above the mirror it said the reason for destruction of the environment), and signs explaining how to recycle and why you should.

On the tourbus the lady sitting next to me recommended a remedy for my skin disease. Skin disease!? Yes, freckles are considered an illness here! And this lady was no country bumpkin she was a TV actress from Beijing who also worked parttime as a pharmacist's assistant. This actually wasn't the first time I had heard this either.

She told me I was eating too much meat and not enough vegetables. Oh I should also drink more tea. But I showed her the half of my arm that is all white because it doesn't face the sun. "See? There are only a few freckles here. It's not that I am eating bad food, it's the sun! See white, tan, white, tan!" Her response was this "No that's not true....it's just that the skin on the bottom of your arm is more healthy." After that I told her that almost everyone in my immediate famliy has freckles and that it was genetic...to which she said "Such an unhealthy family, you must tell them what I have told you." She recommended some medicines and creams I should take for this "ailment."

5 hours later I was on my plane back to Chongqing.

I had a chatty 12 year old boy in the seat next to me and he told me about cartoons, Chinese music, his favorite American superstars, and his English class. His parents were so happy that he was sitting next to a foreigner...as a sign of friendliness they called me "big brother."