Guilin

Guilin is a city, but you would never know that from where we stayed.  We left Chengdu and landed in Guilin.  It was raining, at times teeming.  Our cab driver seemed confused at first, but she was able to figure out how to get us as close as possible to our hotel.  We pull up to a dead end, and she gestures with her right hand....there, there, go thru there.  We shrug, pull on backpacks and head into the rain having no clue if we are in the right place or not!  We get into this maze of shops and restaurants and are trying to figure out do we keep under cover, or venture out into the rain?  Ultimately, I made a scouting mission and decided we should exit the covered shops and try to find our hotel.  We duck under cover of an awning and a very nice lady tries to help us.  Turns out we were only 2 store fronts away from the hotel.

We enter, soaking wet; and they proceed to check us in and upgrade us to a suite.  Thank you very much.  It also turned out that there were self serve laundry facilities. No dryer, however, so we had to hand clothes all over the room hoping they would dry in time.

We went out for some food and settled on some noodles in soup.

 The 2 photos below were the view out our window.  You'd never know you were in a big city!

 At night, we ventured into the night market.  You can see that the streets are still rain soaked.  We wandered around, it was a mix of stores and stalls, with higher end stuff in stores and cheap crap in the stalls.

We opted to have dinner in a place called Wife's Cooking.  When we looked at the menu, we realized that it was a total ripoff of Grandma's in Beijing.  The menu was identical!  We kept pointing to things and the waitress would shake her head, no or yes.  Most of the things that I wanted were unavailable.  We ended up with sliced pork belly, dry fried string beans, sweet and sour cabbage, and a fried rice.

It was nice to get to bed.  The bed was hard and large...(oh, my)

Tomorrow is another day.