Advertisement
With our morning schedule rearranged, we were all up early and catching taxis to the Hong Kong airport before 7:00am. I can’t speak about the other drivers but the one I was with must have felt like he was channeling moves from The Transporter because he was taking us through Hong Kong with breakneck speeds and tactical passing precision. Again the traffic on the highway wasn’t so busy so his maneuvers weren’t overly harrowing. At the airport, check-in went easily enough and besides making final call to board the plane no reasons for panic arose.
Time in the air passed quickly and we were meeting Ming Ming and Molin from CLI shortly after touching down and effortlessly passing through customs. On route to CLI we passed through the outskirts of Guilin were a new city is emerging. It’s incredible to think they’re economic growth is powering such massive expansion.
After that last bit of travel by bus we made it to CLI and were shown our rooms for the three week stay. After a short break we went out to lunch, and what a meal it was after coming off two days of
surviving on airline food rations. Seated in a separate little room we packed 13 people around the table eagerly waiting for our first taste of authentic Chinese cuisine. Then it all started coming out rotisserie chicken, seaweed noodles, tofu dishes, fried rice, plus much more and given the centralized lazy susan serving configuration it was all coming around in an instant. The chicken was served whole with the head and tail still present, so to make things feasible for chopsticks the restaurant server who brought it to the table also tore it apart by hand. Everything was great and it was fun to us the tiny bowl-like teacups for drinking.
Afterwards we were introduced to our péngyou from the local university who gave us a tour of the campus and guided us around town and most importantly across streets because that is feat not to be taken by those faint of heart. Traffic here appears to adheres to its own governance. You’ve got buses, cars, scooters, and bikers all on the same streets. Of course the bikers and scooter can’t keep up with standard traffic speeds so everyone else has to pass them, it leads to a
lot of honking horns for warnings. There are typically feeder paths separating the main road and sidewalk space too which is multi-utilized by pedestrians, bikers, and two wheeled motorist for travel in both directions so there is always plenty to watch out for. But the real fun comes when you want to cross a major road where no cross-walk light exists. Like they told us you just have to just start walking and keep your pace so the drivers can accurately predict your movements so as to adjust their path because they’ll do their best not to stop. Yeah, it’s pretty terrifying.
Later on we went to dinner for another lazy susan event. The friend rice at this place was pretty good, it was served in a large cast iron bowl to keep it warm. The rice at the bottom was a little extra crispy, it was the good stuff. They’re was also squid and the rest I don’t remember because I’m too far behind with writing these entries and most of the stuff I’m can’t tell what it is based on how its prepared or I just don’t know the name.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.089s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0409s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb