Today begins an adventure that has been in the making for a while. I’ve wanted to travel more in China for a long time, and since I went home in the winter this year, I figured this summer would be a perfect time to go to some places that I’ve been wanting to see in China. However, when I told most people about my trip, the most common response was, “Ooh, that’s going to be hot.” They weren’t wrong. And I haven’t even gotten to the hottest place.
We’re on the river now, though, and I’m thoroughly enjoy the breeze (and especially the air conditioning in our room on the cruise ship). But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’m enjoying this stage of my trip with Ruby, and good friend of mine who was also one of my first students. We met up in Yichang this morning, and we found a bus in to the city where we dropped off my suitcase. Then we started exploring according to a route that Ruby found.
Our first stop was a children’s park with a fake Great Wall of China. Since we didn’t get to climb the real one in April (future blog post coming on that), we figured this was our consolation prize. Unfortunately, we could only look at this one.
Next, we stopped in a cute souvenir shop with a bunch of bears outside the window. I wondered what would happen to them when it rained. Maybe they aren’t as soft as they look? I forgot to touch them to see.
Our next destination was a road that was mostly for food. Thankfully it was around lunch time. We walked around for a bit, but then Ruby decided to just look up what was good online. She found an excellent dumpling shop that was only about 2 minutes walking from where we were. Unfortunately, it was closed.
We popped into another restaurant and talked to the worker for a while. She said that the dumpling place closed for a month during the hottest part of the year. Sounded smart to us. That restaurant was hot.
We decided to try Chen tiao noodles instead. Yummmm! The noodles were thicker than I usually like, but the flavor was excellent! They also gave us free soy milk and let us fill up our water bottles.
We walked along the river for a while, but it was early afternoon and super hot. Even though we used an umbrella for shade, it was pretty hot. We wanted to walk to a bridge, but we gave up and took the taxi to the shopping mall so we could enjoy the air conditioning.
We tried on some clothes in Uniqlo, but then the bench in the fitting room was so nice, we decided to stay for a few minutes and enjoy the comfortable seat and the air conditioning. It wasn’t busy, so I didn’t feel bad about it, haha.
Ruby suggested we get a foot massage, and I heartily agreed. I’m always down for a good foot massage. We found a cheap package online, but it wasn’t exactly what we wanted. But the boss was super nice and gave us what we wanted anyway. He also talked with us, recommending interesting places/food and telling us about life in the city.
We’d seen a guokui (锅盔–flat bread baked in a huge round oven–filled with meat or sweet paste) place nearby, but the massage owner recommended a different one, so we followed his advice, and it was excellent.
Next to the guokui shop, there was a hill, and I wanted to explore, so we walked up the road and through the village. People sold vegetables and meat on the side of the road, and we enjoyed the feeling of seeing the community as we munched on our guokui and walked down the road. We kept following the random road back in the general direction of the river when we came upon a side stream that had quite a strong current.
There was a lovely path next to the stream, and we followed it until we found an old man trying to fish. I didn’t think it seemed like a very good place to fish, and Ruby started chatting with him.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“An hour.” The man replied as he threw the line into the river again.
“Why are you fishing here?”
“We aren’t allowed to fish in the main river.” Ahh, I was starting to understand.
“Did you catch anything?”
“Nope! There’s no fish here!” The man smiled as he said it, and moved further along the wall, trying to find a better spot.
“Ahh, so you just do it because you love it?”
“Yep!” The man smiled even bigger. We kept walking toward the river and saw another man also trying to fish. He hadn’t caught anything either. I wished they would be able to catch something, but the current was strong, and it didn’t look likely.
We headed toward the check-in area for our cruise down the Yangtze. We had to check in and then take a bus to the cruise ship departure point. Up until now, everything had gone pretty well, but by this point we were tired and hungry. There was another extra fee that I had forgotten about and seemed pointless. Then we thought dinner was included, but it wasn’t, so we had to pay for that too.
But eventually, we got everything worked out, ate some food, explored the ship and settled into our room. Most things on the ship cost extra, but thankfully we’re able to take showers without having to pay anything extra, hahaha.
Looking forward to leaving port tomorrow!