Chinky

08/11/06

"China Part 5"

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Day 5

I got up this morning to sit on a bus for 3 hours going to a place called Li-Jiang. At start of this trip I was told that we are going to a place to eat. A three hour trip to go to a place to eat... this is going on the list of stupidly long trips for retarded reasons. This one goes above driving to NY for an afternoon of eating but below driving to Key West to watch the sunset. When I got to the place though, I find out that it’s actually worth it. WELL worth it. The place serves bugs! Hah! Awesome. They didn’t have dragonflies today but they did have some sort of worm thing. It didn’t come with the meal we were having but I wouldn’t leave until I got some of that. We got some a la carte. I was actually disappointed. It wasn’t very much of anything. It wasn’t good nor disgusting outside of looking at it. It was like an oily french fry with no salt added. Sigh...

The next spot on the list is the "Ancient City." I don’t know how ancient it is and I don’t know how many cities are made of just bars and little stores but that’s all it was. There were stores everywhere but they didn’t sell a whole lot of stuff. Every third store sold the same thing. Basically there were only 4 types of stores. Food stores, jade stores, leather and clothing stores, and knick knack stuff.

We originally only had an hour to explore but the group wanted more time to shop so we got 2 I think. As soon as I could I went exploring on my own. I couldn’t stand any more time shopping with my mom and grandma. No offense, but it’s not very interesting, and it’s really slow. I try to find some gifts to bring home but wasn’t very successful. I did find a food store that sold frog skin. I hadn’t tried that before so I had me some. It was grilled and had the texture similar to a chip. The taste can’t really be compared to anything I can think of though. I also had some beer. The strongest beers they have here kind of taste like mildly cheap Canadian beer.

We drive back to the hotel which is 3 min. away. We rested for a little more than an hour and we had a choice. Go eat dinner and see a show or stay at the hotel. I was tired. This trip is exhausting. I opt for sleep instead of dinner and a show. In fact I never woke up to make the decision. I fell asleep when I got to the hotel and I only woke up sometime later to take a shower and actually crawl into bed instead of just sleeping on top of the bed.