Today, we went spelunking. For those of you who get "spelunking" confused with "skinny dipping"--it's not even remotely close to being the same thing. You know who you are :) This adventure started at 7:20 Saturday morning. Let me just tell you how excited I was about that. Let me also tell you a little bit about 7:20 a.m. in China. It's still pitch dark outside. It's really really cold. Nobody else is out and about. Basically, it's an unholy time to be up and about on the weekend. We met the car (we have chauffers who work for the school) and ate beef noodles for breakfast. Think Ramen Noodles with slices of beef and cilantro and onions. Isn't that what you eat for breakfast? It's almost as good as waffles!
Anyway, despite our early start, we had a fun day at Longgong. It's called the Dragon Palace in English. It is currently a 4A tourist attraction, and they want to make it a 5A attraction. The inspectors (or whomever) were there today to judge it, so that's why they called in the laowais (foreigners). It looks good if there are foreigners visiting. We were an attraction ourselves. The Chinese tourists (who, by the way, are every bit the stereotypical Asians with cameras) took pictures with us. Kelsey told one guy that he could take our picture if he paid us 3 yuan. She told the next guy that it would cost 5 mao (half a yuan). When they asked why it was cheaper, Kelsey said, "He is more handsome." If they're gonna stare at us, we might as well entertain ourselves :)
We also took a boat ride through an amazing cave. The top of the cave was probably 600 feet up from the surface of the lake. It had amazing formations and great acoustics. Then we had to fill out a survey rating Longgong. On the first one I filled out, I gave the signs a rating of "fair" because one of them said "Hurl the telephone," which is actually supposed to say something to the effect of "For complaints, call this number." Apparently they shredded that one because I had to fill out another one, and I gave everything a "very satisfactory" rating. It's a very Chinese thing to do. For whatever reason, they gave us free purses after we filled out the surveys with a deck of cards in them.
We went to the restaurant and waited for an hour and a half for lunch to come. We were starving! Considering that it was fancy food to impress us, it was a really good lunch. The fancy food is actually way worse than the cheap food. However, there was no turtle floating in the soup, which is always a pretty good possibility, so that was nice. There were chicken livers which we skipped, but there was smoked beef, some sort of greens, wassun (like a cross between pea pods and cucumber), cabbage, cold noodles, cashews, fish, 2 kinds of soup, dumplings, sweet rolls, rice (of course)...I think there was more stuff, but that's all I can remember. I had my first bite of fish in China. It takes a little getting used to. They serve the whole fish, head and eye and skin and everything, and you pick pieces off with your chopsticks. The fish was actually really good despite its grotesque appearance.
After lunch, we went to another cave called Buddha Palace, except the sign said Duddha palace, but they tried. Again, the top of the cave was probably at least 600 feet high, and there were golden Buddhas that had to be at least 50 feet tall. It was sort of surreal. The cave was so beautiful, and the Buddhas were so gaudy. It was really sad to see. People came and paid the monks to bow to Buddha and throw coins in the lucky dragon pool. There are so many superstitions here, and it's so empty.
posted by Sara @ 6:43 AM
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