Lijiang 4th Day

Woke up in time for breakfast. I think if they didn't serve breakfast, we would have slept in bed longer. The beds are so comfortable here. I guess everything's relative but the rooms in GuanFang are pretty good.

We wanted to see 2 places today, Black Dragon Pool Park and BaiSha (village for minorities). We headed for Black Dragon Pool Park first. It was bigger than we expected and tickets cost a dear 60Y each. Pretty much an artificial garden with a huge lake. There was a painter inside featuring paintings with Dragons and landscape. Ross rather liked the landscape paintings. We stayed and talked to the painter for a while. He was very enthusiastic about his work and said that he has customers all over the world. He first guessed that I am Japanese and Ross Australian. Well, at least he got one right. But I was impressed that he knew where Singapore was anyway. Most people here first guess that I'm local, I would reply that I'm Singaporean. I'm usually sceptical that they know whether that means within China or overseas. We left the place intending to come back later. We walked around the park and even somehow ended outside the park. It started raining at this point. But we have really been very lucky with the weather. The times when we did our nature treking, JiuZhaiGou and Tiger Leaping Gorge, it was supposed to be raining but we had pretty fine weather throughout.

We came back into the park (showed our tickets and didn't have to pay again). We bought a landscape painting from him (RMB390).

We headed to the Ancient Town next for some lunch. We went back to Sakura and got a pizza and a pasta. It turned out to be fantastic. I'm really grateful we managed to find some decent food around here, and dreading our stop in Kunming next. The outstanding problem with food here is that there seems to be only one chef in the kitchen. If both of us did not share food, one will be eating after the other has finished.

It started pouring again when we left the cafe. We wanted to head to Looking at the Past Pavilion ( wang4gu3lou2) cos we saw some landscape paintings there we might want to buy. We had to walk up slopes and wet slippery steps to get there. After climbing up numerous stairs to get there, we decided we much prefered the painting we got in the morning, which turned out to be a blessing we got it!

Pending the bad weather, we headed back to the hotel.

Spent some time lazing in the hotel, using the internet, catching up emails and so on. We left the hotel for dinner at Old Town. We walked up some distance away from the crowd to make some calls, the place we made the calls happened to be a tea shop. While Ross was on the phone, I chatted with the owner. He asked where we were from. I was impressed that he knew Singapore was another country. I asked him about some of the tea he has. He was surprised that I knew how to read chinese characters (well, he doesn't know that much about Singapore then). I felt he was a very honest guy. The people in Lijiang seems to be nice and honest in general. I saw some corns hanging on his door as I have seen in other shops and asked him the significance. He said that it meant something like hoarding wealth. We bought some tea from him before we left the shop.

Since it was getting late, we headed for dinner back in Blue Papaya (even though we were worried they might pee in our food), trusting that we would get good food. We also got a chocolate cake for dessert and it tasted just as good as we remembered