Thursday, March 19, 2009

Trip to Guangxi III: Final Thoughts

I wanted to include the last thoughts or pics on the trip to Guilin before I move onto the next thing. Yangshuo's foreigner-hangout and really the only interesting strip in the city is called Xi Jie, or West Street. We went a couple of times for shopping, coffee, etc. Xi Jie at night:

When you get out of the big cities, you see a lot of interesting vehicles in China. Like these old trucks with exposed engines. They make quite the clanking as they putter down the street and are really only used for trash, landscaping, etc.

Back in Guilin we visited the Elephant Trunk Hill. Apparently to Chinese people, this is a symbol of this city. Of course, I had to demonstrate where the hill got its name:

Around the mountain were photo ops with various local cultural outfits. I chose to go the fisherman route. These are my fish-catching birds:

I couldn't find many specialties in Guilin except for Mifen, or "rice noodles." I'd say this is one province with relatively few offerings when it comes to food. These noodles are served up with a little meat and pieces of vegetables and then you add as much pickled vegetables and spices to the soup as you can handle. It's OK...but pretty uninteresting compared to other Chinese foods.

However, rice wine and corn juice were both new to me on this trip! Rice wine was not so good...I just wanted to try it because I was amazed they had found yet another way to eat rice. Corn juice, however, is fabulous. It is served warm with a bit of honey...like a thin, sweet soup. We ate it practically every day we were down there, so this was definitely a good culinary find.

That's all for the Guilin trip. Next stop: Seoul.

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