Weather: 68F sunny in Shanghai
Time: 220pm
As we left on Wednesday afternoon I had no expectations for this trip. I was “just along for the ride.” In short, this trip was a fantastic experience. A group of five total visited many beautiful outdoor locations. The train was alright. Guilin is a larger town with many things available to do and see. We had a condensed Guilin schedule because we had heard that Yangshuo was a better place to visit – less touristy. This is a very long series of blog posts, I hope the detail is appreciated.
Guilin
As an overview of Guilin, this town is like many of the places I have seen before in China. There are plenty of things to buy and places that exist for tourism only. We were told that over fifteen million people visit Guilin each year. It was a clean town and was very much an modern place. The only relics were are now tourist sites.
Train
The train left Shanghai just after 5pm Wednesday. My expectations were set very low from the last train ride to and from Xi'an. I had decided that trains take a long time, tend not to be on schedule, and could feel very crowded very quickly. We had soft sleepers, four to a room. Thankfully, I was not the odd man out – though the fifth man only was not in our room when he was sleeping. I studied a little for my exam on the following Monday. We played cards for a while before going to the food car. Watching a movie and drinking beer with friends on the train was a good time.
The next day we killed time by plays cards and discussing things we could do in Guilin and Yangshuo, since we had not yet hammered out an agenda. The discussion drifted from locations to pick pockets and other bad deals. One of the books had written about pick pocketing being especially bad in the Guilin area because of the high volume of tourists. Another article discussed a common scheme that I had seen in Sanya. A little girl (less than five years old) approaches with flowers and uses aggressive sales techniques into pressure the target to buying a flower. If the sale is unsuccessful, the parents who are usually nearby and watching report the tourist to the police for abuse, then you have to explain to the police what happened. Explaining that to the police can be very difficult if the police do not know English. In Sanya the little girl was leaning and begging for the target to buy a flower from her and despite attempts could not get away. I had shouted that a spin move would be the key to success, but it was not attempted at the time. Another warned of Bamboo Rafts on the Li River not dropping passengers off at requested destinations as well as outrageous prices. At the end of the train ride, I was happy to leave the train station just about 23 hrs after I had left Shanghai.
Pagodas
After checking into the hostel and eating a delicious Chinese restaurant, we walked around Guilin. We came across the twin pagodas built in one of the lakes there. As night fell, we took many pictures. The picture taking and posing was drawing the attention of the Chinese tourists, particularly the college aged girls. As we were taking pictures I noticed one of the girls was taking pictures of a fellow in the group with blonde hair and blue eyes. I walked up behind her and called her out on it by inviting her to join the gentleman who was being candidly photographed. She was very embarrassed and insistently said no thank you. Her friends however, took up my offer eagerly. I tried to get the girl in the photo, but she was adamant about not being in the picture.
It seems to be that once the picture with a foreigner practice starts it does not come to an end until everyone there has had a chance to get a picture with a foreigner. After the first group of girls went through and had their picture taken, another group of five or six girls also wanted their picture taken with all of their cameras. Following that, another group of many girls asked for the picture. It concluded with a group picture of all five Americans being squeezed into a picture with a few of the Chinese girls that started it all. As the excitement started to die down from the group pictures, the first flower kid was spotted.
Flower Child
One friend of mine and I both spotted this five or six year old girl approaching with a hand full of roses. He and I made our exit quickly and apparently without the other Americans noticing. The little girls are very persistent that you buy the flowers they were selling. Her golden tactic here was to take a flower and stuck it in to the opening on a half zipped jacket. She was selling the flowers for only five yuan, but still – there was no need for a flower. The guy who got flowered tried to hand it back and say he did not want it. I realized she was being stubborn and started shouting from a distance “no want!” in Chinese. My thought was if we made a scene out of it there was a smaller chance of this guy having to deal with an abuse / assault charge from the police. It is difficult to be rude to these children because they are very cute and do not know that what they are doing is considered socially unacceptable. Eventually he tried to set the flower down and that ended the sale. This event made us come up with a keyword to avoid this situation again.
Soon after, I spotted another child and yelled the keyword. The group began moving quickly but for one guy it was just too late. He was engaged by the child and I started to suggest, more specifically yell, “Spin move!” The guy performed the spin move very well, like the ex-high school football player he is. This spin move leaned on the kid a bit and almost toppled the child over. It was a fantastic sight because – as noted in previous posts Chinese do not know much about American football and these techniques are fantastic evasion tools.
Bus Driver
The next morning we had ordered a tour package to ride a boat on the Li River. A bus came to pick us up and this driver clearly learned his English by watching movies and MTV. Every sentence he said was cliché. It partly entertainment value and also quite literally his lack of knowledge of the English language. As we parted ways with him we got the, “Hasta la vista, baby!” style goodbye. I have some video of this man speaking in the car, hopefully you will get to hear it when I return home.
Part 1 of 2
Biber
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