chocolate ice-cream

So the Guangxi province was absolutely spectacular. Yangshou, a small town outside of Guilin, is beautiful with lovely people. It's the kind of place that makes me want to drop everything and move there with nothing but a hash pipe and a groovy pair of purple, striped, drawstring pants (note: I don't actually own a pair of purple, striped, drawstring pants, and I never actually use the word 'groovy'). And honestly, I only get that sensation like once or twice a year.

Anyway, there was hiking and biking and nature and interesting rock formations. I got a bit sunburned. At least I finally got my summer color at the beginning of October. It was all very enchanting until I got food poisoning. Leave it up to China to ruin a good time by throwing a curve ball right into my gut. Amazingly, it wasn't from the Chinese food, but from a little bit of chocolate ice-cream I ate. I can't believe it. However, since I had finished some Chinese food a couple hours earlier, I still managed to vomit that up all night as well. I can tell you that Chinese food coming out looks the same as coming in. It's not pleasant. And throwing up rice is probably the worst experience in the world. I kid you not. It was pretty bad. I think I was actually vomiting blood at one point. I realize this is a bad sign, but I'll be damned if I go to a Chinese hospital, especially in the countryside. And I seem to be doing okay now, so I'm not too worried.

So that was my Wednesday night. On Thursday my friends decided they wanted to hire a boat to take us back up the Li River to Guilin. Easy for them to say, since I was the only one who spoke Chinese. So in my slightly hallucinating, definitely delusional state I bargained for a boat. But I couldn't get one that would go the entire way. So we had to take a bus, then a motorbike, then the boat, then another boat, and then two more buses to get to Guilin. Did I mention I was vomiting the entire night before?

Anyway, at some point my delusions changed. I was no longer the master of Chinese who could bargain the best price, but I became a worm, slowly being tortured under the leering and mocking gaze of children with a magnifying glass. This was as we were trudging through the heat of Guangxi to our second boat.

China is supposedly the oldest civilization in the world. Our second boat was just to get us to cross the river. You could ask, "Why didn't our first boat just drop us off on the other side of the bank?", but honestly, you'd never get an answer to that. For thousands of years it hasn't occurred to a single Chinese person that that could be an option. Anyway, regardless of that, the place we had to walk to in order to get the boat to cross the river also wasn't an easy situation. These people have been crossing this river for literally thousands and thousands of years. And now, with the advent of modern technology, it still takes 6 phone calls on cellular phones, two different boats, and five pieces of paper with red chops on them in order to cross a bit of water about 100 feet wide. If I didn't have any bags, I would have swam. Or walked across, the water wasn't deep.

The oldest civilization in the world.

But it is a beautiful area of the world and I highly recommend getting there before they turn it into an amusement park with strip malls, toboggan rides, flash bars, and crap hotels. I'm not kidding you, they will do it.

And for a couple of days I remembered why it is that I spend so much time on China. I still can't put it into words.