We were on a train heading to Guilin , listening to carols and cracking open chestnuts. It was Christmas day. And that was our Christmas dinner. (If only there was an open fire!) The train ride was 17 hours long, but we were lucky enough to grab a soft-sleeper cabin. Soft-sleepers have 4 beds, one above another on one side of the wall, and the same configuration on the opposite side. And the beds actually have some padding (compared to hard-sleepers "board of wood") and you can lock the doors.
The train arrived in Guilin at noon the following day and we went out in search of a good lunch (we found some bread).
Guilin is called "cinnamon forest" in Chinese, probably because the city is just full of cinnamon trees. But that's not the only forest around the city. The other one is made of stone. These towering rocks are scattered throughout the landscape, rivaling office buildings in size. While eating dinner in a U.B.C. coffee shop, we tried to count these giant boulders before our pizza arrived.
The next day Bryce, Peter and I took a ride to the Seven Star Park in downtown Guilin. This is one of the main attractions of the city, having parks, caves, a zoo, pandas, waterfalls and wild monkeys. Five years earlier, Bryce and I sat on a tiger there; this time though, he wasn't there. Instead, there were monkeys. Peter had to get a picture with them, and at 75 cents (5 yuan) it sounded like a good deal. The two primates jumped on him, stood on his head and bit his hair. The 2 poor guys had little ropes around their skinny head, and mini clothes that were probably made for a baby.
Our next stop was the panda exhibit. This part wasn't completed yet, but the pandas didn't seem to care, they were munching and crunching away at bamboo the whole half hour we were there.
For breakfast the following day we ate McDonalds. The McDonalds. Chinese love their fast food. Whether it's Dicos, EFG, Kung Fu Fast Food or Ramen, they can't get enough of it. And the number of overweight people in China is rising fast. It's cheap, tasty and fast food restaurants are sprouting up like weeds. In fact, the number of overweight and obese people in China increased 28 fold between 1985-2000.
When we got up there, (McDonalds is on the second floor) what did we see? More foreigners. Well, Peter got a Big Mac and I bought a McChicken. And so there we sat, my mother and brother eating fries, while Peter and I were eating our burgers, glancing over every now and again to see what the Americans were eating.
But even weirder then that was the place we ate dinner, McFound. A cross between a Chinese restaurant, a diner, and a log cabin, this place was certainly interesting. The food was actually good though! The meat was fantastic, along with the sauce. But to top it off, the toothpicks tasted like cinnamon, which always gets points in my book.
We woke up the next day ready for our trip to Nanning. The train ride we took was only 4 hours long, but the seats were very, very, hard. The trip is especially bad when you are sitting next to 4 other guys smoking.
Nanning was dreary; rain clouds and smog clogged the air as well as our spirits. But fortunately, our next destination was sunny Vietnam, something we were really looking forward to. We met our dad in Nanning and hopped on a bus going to beautiful Vietnam. (It was raining there too.)
(Continued in next post)
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