Cabin Cabbage and Tea Ceromonies

Monday 20th November 2006

Left Beijing today to meet my Ozzy friend to fly south to Guilin (and you thought I was going to say Oz didn’t you?) – the journey to the airport was 100 times worse than trying to get to Heathrow on a Monday morning with a tube strike on but with the added bonus of pollution smog and fog mixed into a leathal concoction. I suggest that you do not try this drink at home. The flight to South China smelt of cabbage, not only cabbage but rotton cabbage and the food wasn’t much better. Although I do like getting into the culture of things I was not too keen on rice and vegetables for breakfast so gave that a miss, good olde cereal bars came in handy that morning. I am now travelling with my Ozzy friend for a week, we are staying in hotels (she isn’t a hostel type person) so here’s to my week of “luxury”. We were picked up by our guide at Guilin airport, first impressions she seemed nice enough, very chatty and started telling us about the history of Guilin. Felt a bit strange being picked up at airport and shuffled into a private car, rather than navigating your own way to the accomodation. A bit of luxury as I said but at the same time I felt like I had lost control over things a little already. Make the most of it I thought as I’ll be back to public transport next week. During our journey to the hotel we got free history and geography lessons, I enjoyed the geography lessons more – all about the formation of the landscape – which was very magical, enclosed rolling montrosoties rising up everywhere. There was no homework tonight. Hotel was posh for my standards, – consiergue and all that sort of thing. It’s all nice though I get a slight feeling I could be anywhere in the world. We opted for a tour up a mountain via cable car for the rest of the afternoon – up Mountain Yao – Yao, i said yao, yao. To get to the top of Yao we could either fly or take the cable car, my friend can not swim or fly so we took the cable car instead. The view at the top was undescribable – pinnacles rising from the earths surface all around us as we walked above the clouds. Our geography lesson was repated again (and again) once we got back into the car, It was a bit like flicking through the EPG only to find that there is nothing on the tv apart from repeats of Blackadder or Keeping Up Appearances. We weren’t even to be examined on this so I am not sure why the repeats. Tea tea tea tea, if you know me well you know I like tea. So when asked if we wanted to vist a tea plantation I was like er “no I really can’t be bothered”. Of course we visited the tea plantation. Learning about the different sorts of teas was fascinating enough but there was more to come as we were welcomed into a tea cerromony, shown how to drink tea chineese style and tried 5 different teas. Tea tea tea and tea. I was tea’d out by the end of it, but still wanted more tea. The night market that evening was intreguing. I expected something like the markets in Beijing but a bit disapointed due to the amount of of tack tack and more tack. Tacker than tat tat tat. So we bought more tea from a little tea shop. Long day meant time for bed.