The bus arrived at about 4:00am, a little too early for Yan-Shih and I. Neither of us slept that well -- the road (highway?) was in pretty bad shape, and the bus drive drove pretty insanely. In fact, whenever Yan-Shih woke up I kept saying "I love you, I love you"; I didn't know if each time I fell asleep would be my last. But we made it, somehow, and had to find our hostel.
We walked out of the train station and in the general direction of our hostel. We asked a cleaning lady and she just sort of replied "that way" -- a couple helped us more and we finally found it. By 5:30 we were knocking on the front door, and a guy drinking beer let us in. We checked into our dorm, and fell asleep.
By 12:00 we had woken up and decided to explore the city. We wandered out and over to the Seven Star Park, across the river. Notice next to the river the huge clocks of different cities -- not a single one of them functioning (which seems to be somewhat of a motif throughout China). We arrived the park and after buying our tickets, saw a girl drinking jin jiu nai cha. I asked her where she bought it, and we bought one ourselves. Too sugary, way too sugary. We entered the park and took a b-line away from the other tourists. We found a little path off to the right, and then a little path into the mountains. Nobody was on this path, and we finally reached a small gazeebo type of thing.
I'm dazing over the city and the surrounding hills, and Yan-Shih gasps. I look behind me and a group of monkeys were sitting on the bench. I tried to take a photo, but they had already wandered away. Moments later another monkey lazily jumps on the bench, sits down, scratches its head, and wanders off. An hour or so later we wandered off too.
Next we wandered to the "zoo", which was quite depressing. First, we stepped into the panda bears cage, and saw the most depressed bear we had ever seen. The sign next to the panda said "the zoo has saved this bear, who's habitat was disturbed to due shifting forest climate" or something like that... aka deforestation left the panda without a home.
Next we saw a brown bear, which now claims the award for the most depressing bear we have ever seen. It was in a cage the size of a small dorm room, just walking in circles. Near the bear was some Chinese guy with a monkey dressed as a clown -- whenever the monkey didn't "perform" accurately, the clown beat it with a stick. A group of Chinese tourists were viewing with glee.
We walked around the back of the zoo and saw "camel hill", three hills that look like a camel. Some tourists took some photos of me.
By 18:30 we had left the park and wandered back to the hostel. We sat in the lobby talking for some time, and finally arranged a boat ride up the LiJiang river for the next day. Some food was eaten, and we walked up to our room. In our room were two guys -- one French and the other American. We sat talking for about an hour about politics, life, China and traveling. Then, bed time.
This entry is from my journal and was written on July 2, 2007. It's been tagged with Travel and Yan-Shih and The WTF. There have been 0 comments so far.