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Girls we met at the restaurantYangshuo was extremely beautiful. The main part of the city was a pedestrian street with shops and some hotels and bars. There are mountains all around and also the famous Li River runs on one side of the city. The restaurants in Yangshuo are mostly Western food and coffee shops, and everything is very expensive by China standards. We ate at a place that had all kinds of food, I ate curry. They also had some dark Chinese beer, which I’ve been trying to find but never found it for a reasonable price in Beijing. It was pretty good, it tasted kind of sweet like it had a little bit of molasses in it. We ended up talking to the waitresses there because we were the only customers since we were eating a little bit late. It turned out they don’t work there usually, they are only there for a week. There is a program at the Yangshuo language university that brings English majors from small colleges around the country to study for a week since there are so many foreigners in Yangshuo. They invited us to a party the program was having on Thursday night, our last night in the
city. We said we’d go and they were really excited, they had never really talked to English speakers despite the fact that they were all English majors. We felt like celebrities because they took pictures of us over and over again, after that treatment from six girls we were kind of worried about how Thursday night would go with all 120 girls in their class.
That night a bunch of us went out to a café and hung out. We had some drinks and sat and talked, it was a lot of fun just hanging out. The bars in Yangshuo are pretty cool, they have dancing but it is usually a small dance floor and the bars are also smaller. I’m not sure why, but they are also not nearly as smoky as Beijing bars, so I was happy about that. After the café we went to a bar and hung out, I didn’t dance much but we played a dice game that is popular in China, so that was cool. After a while I got hungry, so a friend and I went out for some street food. There wasn’t nearly as much street food as in Beijing, and
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Elizabeth on the bamboo boats the few that they have is much more expensive. I found a lady with some noodle soup stuff where you pick what you get in your soup, it was delicious and only a little over a dollar.
The next morning we got up and went to ride bamboo rafts on the Li River. It was five people to a boat and it was very beautiful. It was also very nice and cool outside so it was a very comfortable couple of hours on the boat, I have some pretty cool pictures from that. We stopped at one point on the bank and skipped some rocks. It’s interesting to see that some people in my program have never skipped rocks before; never skipping rocks is crazy to think about coming from Minnesota. I guess if they live in a big city or a state without many lakes it’s not that weird. After the boat ride we had a group lunch. During lunch the tour guide told us we could go kayaking in the afternoon for 120 kuai, which is a little less than twenty dollars for 3 hours. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, but a I liked
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Awesome mountains the group who planned on going so I signed up.
We met after lunch and the tour guide took us to a couple vans that would bring us to the starting point for kayaking. It was kind of a long ride and we kept going further and further into the country. It ended by going through a tiny village with terrible roads and then into the woods, but through the woods was the river. The equipment was fine and they even had lifejackets for us to wear. The scenery was amazing, and we were the only ones around. They had a couple motorized bamboo boats that went with us down the river to watch us, and bring the kayaks back when we got to our destination. The sun came out, it was very beautiful, I got some crazy awesome pictures of the group kayaking with the awesome mountains in the background. It was a lot of fun, but by the third hour everyone was going slower and we were all a little sun burnt. Three hours of paddling a kayak is a pretty good workout, so we were all very tired when we finally reached our destination. There was
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Bamboo baot a little bus waiting for us there to bring us back to Yangshuo, it worked out perfectly.
My roommate Andrew and I took a nap and woke up at like eight at night extremely hungry. We met up with Zoey and went to eat some amazingly delicious fried dumplings. We walked around for a while looking at the shops, but we were still tired so we headed back after not too long. We saw a guy in a Mickey Mouse costume, but he wasn’t wearing his head, so we went to talk to him to find out why. We talked to him in Chinese, but he responded in English, and his English was actually pretty good. We asked why he didn’t have his head on, he said it’s too hot, that made us laugh, which resulted in him saying in a completely straight face, “Don’t laugh, it’s not funny...I hate my job.” At that point we had to say goodbye because that just made us laugh more, he was definitely the worst Disney character I have ever seen. After seeing Mickey Mouse we headed back to the hotel. We messed around on the internet for a while before going
to sleep.
The next day we slept in a bit before heading off to find a place to rent bicycles. The bicycle rental was extremely cheap, which is weird since everything else in Yangshuo is expensive. It was Emma, Katie, Andrew and I in a group riding bikes. We rode through town which was pretty crazy, but then we got out into the countryside and it was a lot more relaxing. The scenery of course was amazing, and the weather was great. A little after we left we went through a village and stumbled across an elementary school. They were very excited to say hello to us and we ended up hanging out there witht he kids for quite some time. After that we just kept riding around the beautiful countryside. On the way back to Yangshuo we stopped at a little restaraunt and ate a delicious lunch. After getting back I ended up taking another nap before the last group dinner of the trip.
After dinner it was almost time to go to the English party at the language University. On the way back to our hotel we actually ran into the girls who invited us, they
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Me and Joanna, Zach made us laugh right before he took the picture were coming to pick us up. We had some time so we walked around with them for a while before going to the party. We got to the party and it looked like Prom in cheesy movies, baloons everywhere and tables with little centerpieces on them. The only difference was they had two tables with bottles of beer on them. We went in and were immediately surrounded by 120 Chinese girls asking to take a picture with us. It took a good 15 minutes before we could get a break from taking pictures and saying hello, a couple of the original girls we knew told us to sit down and gave us snacks and some beer. We walked around meeting people and taking pictures for a while more. There was an MC in the front of the dance floor and a bunch of the students had prepared performances like dancing, singing or reciting poems, it was pretty cool. After the performances we did some cheesy wedding reception type dances and then just a regular dance. It was a lot of fun, and all the students were really excited to hang out with us and all really nice.
That party
ended pretty early, around 10:30 or so, so we decided to catch up with the other people from our program. We called them and they told us what bar they were at and we headed over. When we got to the bar it was all the people from our program and no one else, there was one little girl behind the bar but with all the people we have she obviously couldn't handle it because two guys from our program were behind the bar helping her out. It was pretty funny to see we had taken over this bar, and really cool that the owner/workers were cool with that. It was a lot of fun, and since we were giving them so much business they gave us buy one get one free on everything! They had a pool table and it was a really cool set up for the night. Eventually they had to close and we headed back, not too late because we had to leave the next day. Other than the bus and plane rides home that pretty much wrapped up the end of the semester trip. Another great travel experience in China.
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Ronell
non-member comment
Oh Boy!
So having all these Chinese girls loving you... what is it going to be like when you come home? hmmm... Do you have a sort of beard in the purple shirt? It looks like it. You look older, travel looks good on you.