Guilin, Day 1

I'd never been to Guilin but the pictures I've seen are beautiful, so for Melody's first trip to China i figured this could be the place. After careful planning we arrived in Guilin city on the redeye from Los Angeles, and a long layover in Beijing. Travel was easy, and we were well rested so we went right out into the city after checking into our hotel. 

Heading for the main pedestrian street in Guilin I figured we could easily find food, and some light shopping to ease Melody's initiation into China and Chinese crowds. But we were met with a massive assault of the senses, some of which I had not even seen in my decade of travel to China. The standard overcrowding was present, and the general disregard for other people, but the pedestrian street in Guilin is like all of the bad habits of human race combined with all of the weird Chinese food items westerners have only heard about. 

Right outside our hotel, and all along the main thoroughfare were restaurants known as "wet restaurants." These are places that keep their menu items out front, live in buckets and cages, for you to pick out. All manner of fish, pretty much anything you could catch out of the river (snails, crawfish, clams, and eels), along with snakes, chickens, ducks, frogs, and very fat looking rodents about the size of a small dog. As we were making our way down the street we saw a woman pick out a large fish from the bucket, and slam it on the sidewalk repeatedly to kill it. Now, I eat meat, I grew up hunting, I have no delusions about how our protein gets to the table, but this was unreal. Melody is convinced she will be a vegetarian before we get home. 

Once we got to the pedestrian street we were pummeled by loud electronic music blasting from every store, only to be interrupted by Chinese women screaming on a microphone about whatever sales they were running. Oddly, most of the Chinese seem to ignore the wail of the speakers, which of course causes the salesgirls to scream louder and turn up the music. As we were walking along, the Chinese art of spitting was on fine display, again more than I had ever witnessed. At one point Melody had to jump to avoid getting hit. All manner of meat is grilled on a stick every few meters, and some of these really smell terrible. Imagine this street goes on for about one mile with several intersections also extending out about a half mile each. 

There was a bit of respite from the madness. - a few fine teashops, Chinese herbal pharmacies at each end of the street, art shops, and these homemade spicy, pickled peppers that you could purchase. And we did randomly find one of the best noodle shops in Guilin which we had two nights in a row. 

One of the herb shops had doctors on staff that would recommend herbs, and teas that they made on premises, much like the Dragon Herbs does with retort pouches. We also found Chinese patents to bring home like Yunnan Bai Yao, and Zheng Gu Shui. 

We collapsed into bed that night, exhausted, but thankfully Melody was not deterred.