Guilin Good Times!
Trip Start
Feb 25, 2012
1
28
42
Trip End
Aug 14, 2012
Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang, China
Monday, March 1, 2010
Our hostel was a nice surprise it was quite clean and had a nice courtyard and in a superb location. We settled in the first night and took a bit of a rest from the tormenting travels we’d experienced the night before. We did step out for a bite to eat where my brother, using the advice I gave him, found an excellent restaurant. I told him before that if you ever see a restaurant slammed full of Chinese people that means that you too should try it out because usually it’s a sign of good cheap food. As we discovered the food was amazing and the prices were too!!!! Woo hoo we were happy to have real food after train dinners of noodles.
Later that night we hung out with the other fellow travelers in the bar and made our plans for the next day to visit the local park named Seven Star Park with Gregory, our new Belgian friend. Seven Star Park was praised highly by the receptionists but it was a bit of a disappointment. The park hadn’t been maintained well and as a result it wasn’t "picturesque" but it did contain a few peaks worth hiking for views of the city from above. Most of the fountains inside the park were overgrown with algae and the grasses and flowers were out of control. There was a pretty garden kept up nice for wedding photos and some neat caverns that we found but all in all not interesting. The best part about the park happened to be a silly game of dress up where Anna and I dressed as China girls and had fun posing with the locals for half an hour. Soon after, we all decided to leave for some shopping left for shopping……I needed sunglasses and Carlo was on the lookout for a hat.
Friday night was Feb 28, the last day of the Spring Festival, and also known as the Lantern Festival. On this night the hostel was throwing a Lantern Festival Party and prepared a BBQ with beer pong and such for everyone. We all attended the party and had a blast with everyone! The hostel was nice enough to )et us bring in our own beer for the games (instead of paying 10 yuan per bottle) and so we started several different games around the courtyard. I think at one point Carlo was playing all three….he was having a good time. During the Lantern Festival party we all tried the traditional Chinese dish served on this day which I don’t remember the name but basically it’s a gluttonous rice ball (think chewy marshmallow texture but more dense than actual marshmallow) filled with sweet bean paste served warm in a clear soupy liquid. It is not bad tasting, but the texture is hard for me to adapt to and so I have a pretty hard time eating this stuff but it is always fun to try once! Some of the other special activities included the lantern lighting ritual where everyone wrote their wishes for the New Year on a red paper lantern and then we sent the lanterns into the night sky just like minin hot air balloons. It was so exciting!!!!
Next we all set off fireworks which seemed like fun until I realized that giant roman candles and drunk foreigners don’t mix well. Not only did we run several times because of mis-aimed fireball explosions, the big box o’ flaming firework death balls exploded and flipped over mid-launch sending the rockets into our crowd and lots of people running for the doors. We constantly laughed on new years as people were shooting fireworks into buildings and such only to find ourselves participating in the INSANITY!!! Wow. To end the evening everyone tried out the local bar in Guilin for a quick peek and then came back to crash. So much fun! Most of all I enjoyed meeting the new friends of this hostel they were all really awesome including some Americans from Oregon. We crashed around 2:00 even though we knew we had to wake up for the Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces the following day! Yikes!!!!
