2008-04-08 China
We get up at about 9am. It’s a nice warm sunny day with some wind. At 11:30am the bus tour continues. We stop at a small old town – Kaiping Diaolou. Some of the balconies and most of the windows are behind some fences or metal bars. The tour guide tells us to be careful of the pickpockets. Good that I have not got anything stolen. There can’t be many Western people visiting this village. Guess I am an attraction to some locals as well.
After lunch, we ride on a very bumpy road to reach Zili village in Kaiping Diaolou Guangdong. This is a village built between 1920-1935 by some rich Chinese families who were in Western countries before. This area is a UNESCO World Cultural herritage.
Back to the bus and on the road again. We go shopping to Choisan. Sin Sze look at some shoes and I look for a replacement to my bag. It’s really hard to find a bag without a zipper. We get some drinks and snacks.
After about 2 hours of window shopping, it comes dinner time. It’s interesting that the customers in a restaurant clean the cups and chopsticks with hot water or tea. The food is served and eaten very hot, often not all dishes are served at once. The bowls are small and everyone picks for himself. I really like it that way. So everyone can decide how much and what he wants to eat. The food is very different. Most times I don’t wanna know what it is. There are lots of soups with vegetables and other ingredients like goose feet, chicken is “randomly” chopped so that most pieces contain bones as well. The meat is eaten and the bone placed back on the table. For the second night in this trip, we stay at Taishan Country Garden Phoenix Hotel. The hotel is huge with a ‘Disney’ Venice style. We explore the hotel in the evening. On a pool table we practice some pool basics for about an hour. After that we enjoy a nice and cheap midnight buffet before getting some sleep. Ah right – chinese money (Renminbi (RMB)) can look quite different and is not really obvious how much it is worth. The two upper bank notes are 5 Yuan about 0,46 € the lower Bank note is 5 Jiao about 0,046 €.
