From Emei Mountain

Day Three - Saturday, May 31. Around Guiyang

Time for another outing around Guiyang today. Katherine, Grace, Craig and his friend showed up at around 8 am to get us on our way.

It is 0730. Do you know where your students are?

We walked to the bus stop and caught bus for a ride to the ancient city of Qingyan. The ride to about an hour through some interesting scenery and to the Huaxi park area. From there we took a smaller bus to the back door into the ancient city. Seems the front door has a charge to enter while the back door does not.

The free entrance into Qingyan

The ancient city of Qingyan is a tourist attraction. It is heavily commercial but does offer views of an old city with features of the Ming and Qing Dynasty (I got this from the internet). Sunee shopped and shopped and I took pictures upon pictures. Very commercial but fun to walk around and look at all the stuff. Pictures say it best.

Welcome to Guiyang

Guiyang food is never mild

Bacon is probably good but I passed

For sure pickled something

Casual lunch, what to order?

All kinds of hats, even weird ones

Wood carvings

Howdy, Partner. Welcome to Guiyang - My Country

And through this arch - more shopping

Cute little minority people made up as dolls

Handicrafts everywhere

We always wanted one of these bamboo books

Sugar momma making treats for the kids

Which one looks the best

The famous recording artist, star of movie and stage

After spending most of the day at Qingyan, Sunee, Grace, Katherine and I got separated from John, Craig and his friend. They obviously took a bus back to Huaxi Park before our designated meeting. So we hopped on the bus and met them at Huaxi Park. Decided we did not want to walk around the park and so we walked to another area a few kilometers away. Nice walk but a bit boring. When we got to our destination, it was obvious that they were young and we were old. Too tired to do much but sit around for awhile. We finally took a small van to the bus station and caught a city bus back into town. Us old people were really tired by the time we got to the city bus station so we called it a day.

Beautiful area within walking distance of Huaxi Park

To get something to eat, John, Sunee and I decided to try the famous Guiyang duck. We asked at the hotel reception desk where we could get some and they told us that just down the block to the right were a bunch of places that specialized in it. We were very excited, especially when we saw the beautiful ducks on displace. Funny thing was that the restaurants looked more like noodle or dumpling places than duck restaurants so we walked a couple of more blocks looking for a nice “sit down” restaurant. We found none so we went back to one of these “noodle stand” restaurants and ordered our duck.

Looks great but . . .

Surprise! The ducks we saw on display are not really “cooked golden” as we thought. When one orders a duck, it is chopped up (not much past the skin is done) and thrown into a deep fryer and fried hard. I took a bite and almost died from the spices. My lips were tingling all over. Immediately, I stopped John from trying a piece as he would have died right there on the spot. We sent the duck back and they took the hot off and refried it. Not good at all. Very small pieces of hard fried duck, difficult to eat and not very pleasant tasting. All of us ended up ordering and eating steamed dumpling and even some dumpling soup for our dinner. Biggest disappointed so far in Guiyang. Such beautiful ducks, ruined in the deep fat of Guiyang! Ahh, but our tour to the famous Guizhou waterfalls awaiting us the next day.