China - Yangshuo - 3/20/2005

Well, it is official, beds in China are HARD!!
I sure hope the ones in Hong Kong are softer.
So today we had a "western" breakfast, my favorite detail was that they had slices of cheese in it! It's one of those things that you kind of don't realize until you see it again, but in all of my meals for the past few weeks there was no trace of cheese, except for Tofu, which i'm always reminded is not really a cheese (even though it feels like it). So back to my excitement, it's funny how the small things sometimes make the day start out really well.
After breakfast we were driven to our "cruise" to go to Yangshuo. The weather was very dreary, with visibility almost nill, but once we got on the boat and sailed out things started clearing up as we moved south. The "cruise" was a small riverboat with tables where they crammed 8 people for the 4 hours the trip took place. Although once we were underway we could go topside and take pictures (which i did for awhile). In our table Rohit and I were seated with 6 Chinese women, and we were lucky that at least one of them spoke some passable English, acting as a translator for us. They even taught Rohit how to play cow-cow (A very weird card game, with some weirder scoring rules), while I watched for awhile. On the deck of the boat it was a bit windy, so considering my precarious health conditions I tried to spend little time on the deck, but I think I got some very impressive pictures, it was sad the weather wasn't more cooperative, but it could have been worse if it had been raining. The food on the boat was very interesting since it was cooked on the back of the boat in the open air. Some of the fare was pretty standard, such as rice and veggies, but other things like small deep fried crabs and other small fish was something very weird, and i tried being adventurous and eating some of it (to the sadness of my stomach).
When we got to Yangshuo we were exposed to how commercial the middle of nowhere can become given the right number of tourists.
The town/village is surrounded by hills, and it has a pedestrian street called "West Street" where it's full of stores and western style cafes, most of these places seem to be partly owned by expats, mostly Australians. The hotel we are staying in is 2 blocks away from the street, and I spent most of my afternoon walking around West st. and then reading a novel, while sitting in a cafe drinking a banana milk shake (my current substitute for beer until I'm done with the antibiotics). For dinner Rohit and I went to a cafe that had a sign in Hebrew announcing that the food in that place was good, and it actually WAS pretty good, too. I had sizzling beef that tasted really good. After dinner we walked around West street some more talking to some of the vendors in the market and trying to see how low they would take their prices, while they're open to haggling their prices are still much higher than in Beijing, so Rohit and I were a bit more leery of buying stuff from them.
After awhile I went off in search of a bar that was down a very dark and small alley that advertised a "free pool table", so I was very excited when I found it, and was able to shoot some pool against a Brit called Nick, who then introduced me to his friends, an Aussie named Simon, and a couple of Chinese girls called "Rabbit" and "Winter", they sort of adopted me under their wings and we proceeded to cafe-crawl to a different bar that had a foosball table and many boardgames people could play while getting intoxicated. Personally I had to switch from Coke to water as the night dragged on, since it was getting too sweet for me, while I got my behind handed to me a couple of times by Rabbit in foosball, and then by Simon, so we settled to play a game of Chinese checkers, which I have yet to even comprehend how it's played. After a very fun night of carousing without alcohol, I proceeded to head back to the hotel to sleep in for a night... Yeah, in another very hard bed.