Chinky

08/11/06

"China Part 4"

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Day 4

I spend most of today wandering around our hotel.  It is large.  Instead of building up like most hotels this one builds out.  This is very strange in China, a place with entirely too many people.  In any case there are only three levels in this place and I’m guessing the same amount of rooms as any other 5 star hotel.  It’s very artsy, the décor here is all perfectly matched and very simple but colorful in a non-gotty way.  The tp here is very interesting in that it’s stretchy.  I’ve never had tp that’s stretchy before.

I’m fascinated by this because China is very cheap with a couple things.  The first and most obvious is tp.  If you go to a toilet in any place other than the hotel there probably won’t be any tp.  You’ll probably have to pay to go in too.  The smell of the public toilets is unholy.  I can’t compare it to any other smell in the world that I’ve smelled, and I’ve been to sulfur fields.  If one wasn’t prepared for it one could break their back form the intense heave that’s going to occur.  For this smell and the use of the potty you have to pay .5 RMB.

The next thing that is lacking is water and ice.  It is cheaper to just buy coke than water because you get so much more coke for the same price as water.  It’s to the point that I here some people just buy coke and use it to brush their teeth with.  There’s no ice anywhere either.  Coke is actually served colder than water so there have been times where I would put coke in a glass and put a smaller glass of water inside the glass of coke to have slightly cooled water.  Seriously coke is that disposable here.  A liter and a haft might cost 2 RMB which is about $.25.

I’m very glad the hotel is nice because today isn’t a very exciting day.  We start by visiting some pagodas which are nice but we really are just looking at buildings that we can’t even go into.  I guess if you are an architect you might have a chubby about this stuff cause it is pretty but you have to remember, we can’t go in because it’s so rundown it might break if you walk in.

Next is jade shopping.  Yay... more horrifically expensive jade.

The butterflies.  It is both the prettiest sight we’ve seen and my biggest regret.  When we got off the bus the sight that greeted us was a rundown city.  Seriously it looked as if it has been abandoned for some number of years.   Because it didn’t look that interesting I didn’t bring the good digital SLR I had bought for this trip.  What lay beyond the rundown garden of walls was a bamboo forest, a lush garden and a butterfly greenhouse of sorts.  Everything was gorgeous and I once again am reminded to not judge a book by its cover.  We still took a bunch of pictures with the normal digital camera but I doubt the pictures would turn out half a good.

The next stop is to a boat.  We ride a boat to what I think is an island that has a bunch of people just selling food on the docks.  I had shrimp or crayfish on a stick, squid on a stick and a giant oyster cooked in its own shell.  It was all really weird but very good.  I wish I had more time to eat some of the tiny crabs that they had there.

That night we had a choice we can stay at the hotel or go out shopping.  My choice is obvious and I spend that night online talking to people from back home.  A night well spent and I’ve very glad I got to talk to some people from home.  I miss you guys.