March 26/05 ~ On To Hunan

We are being very careful about the food here. Breakfast was a western style buffet with some Chinese food. We stuck to what was familiar and stayed away from the fruit salad. We went to the business center at the hotel and tried to use their internet since we haven’t been able to figure out how to hook up in our room. It cost us about $16 for 25 minutes. We’ll wait until we get to Changsha and hopefully be able to post our journal online. We checked out the gift shops at the hotel but things are too expensive. We’ll wait until we go to the markets. We checked out of our room at 12:00pm and then piled into a taxi with Louanne and Darren to go to Silk Street. The cab driver was funny, couldn’t speak English, but just laughed at Jamie as he wasn’t wearing a coat (it’s very warm here and people are still wearing their winter jackets). He pointed out the fact that Jamie has hairy arms but little hair on his head and laughed. Silk Street is now housed in a 4 storey building. It reminds me of the flea markets back home with all the booths. There were shoulder to shoulder people. Before you knew it, Jamie was bargaining with the merchants for a Columbia jacket that started out at $60US was down to $25. All you had to do was look at something and a merchant would be in your face and wanting you to buy, "You like? Cheap price for you! Very nice, good quality!" We didn’t buy anything because we are going to wait until the end of the trip. We passed some merchants selling "Rolex" watches. Jamie said, "Those are fake" and the merchant replied, "No fake, real". There were a lot of knockoffs so you have to be careful. We had a lot of fun and then returned to our hotel for a late lunch and then to collect our luggage for the bus ride back to the airport. There we met the rest of our travel group for our 7:30pm flight to Changsha. I forgot to mention that I’ve used a squatty toilet twice at the airport. I should have good leg muscles when I get back to Canada. Our plane was small so seating was tight but it was only a 2 hour flight. We had another crazy bus ride to our hotel. We were feeling pretty tired and getting giddy. Our guide was giving us instructions over the bus sound system and the microphone was on reverb. Jamie was trying to control his laughter and I didn’t dare look at him for fear that I would break out laughing. Our hotel is very nice and we now have internet hookup in our room. The wonderful news is we get Sophie Monday morning at 11:00am!!!
Our first breakfast in China.
Our flight to Changsha, Hunan.
Getting ready for our flight to Changsha, Hunan.