Day 7: Losing the war, Bandit chicken, Bridges too far, and Balcony plans

Mission: Second Honeymoon

Day 7:  Losing the war, Bandit chicken, Bridges too far, and Balcony plans

 

Thursday morning, I was curled up in bed around my laptop.  From where I was, I could see the screen of my lovely wife’s laptop on the desk.  Something wasn’t right.  She wasn’t working.  From the images flashing across the screen, it looked suspiciously like she was checking out hotels.

“I’ve found the perfect hotel and we can move there.” she announced. 

I returned to my absolutely unbeatable solid logical arguments about the noise around bar street, having to pack, move, carry things down narrow, uneven streets, possibly having slow internet (or no internet), etc.  She said, “We’ll change hotels after work tomorrow.  Then we don’t need internet access on the weekend.  It has a river view and it’s not across from Bar Street . . . and I just made a non-refundable booking.”

      

Non-refundable or not, I did want to see it before moving.  We had a rough (VERY rough) idea of where it was on the map of old town.  It was on a section of a street we’d never been down before.  I wanted to see what sort of obstacle course I’d have to haul the luggage through in order to get there (and get out of when it was time to leave).

On the way into old town, I was pleasantly surprised to find a baijiu shop with hollow baijiu gourds at significantly lower prices than elsewhere.  Farther in, I found a different shop with some very unusual baijiu bottles.  They were baked clay and had 3 legs.  My collection of unusual baijiu and baijiu-related items was going to do better than I thought it would. 

Before heading down the street to the hotel, my lovely wife was admiring some “beggar chicken” cooking in front of a few restaurants (right next to cages containing more of those giant guinea pig “rats”).

 

 

She wanted to order a chicken, but I pointed out that a whole chicken would be way too much and we’d end up wasting most of it.  I suggested that some of the restaurants might have less than whole chicken servings.  She disagreed (in the same way a rottweiler disagrees if you try to keep it away from a steak it wants to eat), but finally, after much argument, she reluctantly agreed that she’d order something else.

The restaurant selected for lunch had an alternative called Bandit Chicken.  This turned out to consist of chicken heads, necks, feet, and other bits with minimal quantities of meat.  My personal theory is that bandit chicken is all that’s left after the bandits come in and eat all the better parts of the chicken. 

One other outstanding feature of the restaurant was one of the large, clear bottles of baijiu.  At first, it looked like it was full of large roaches.  Upon closer inspection, these turned out to be cicadas.  I decided that jars full of insects soaked in baijiu were something my baijiu collection could live without.

 

 

The street leading to the new hotel had me worried at first.  Seems there’s a mini version of bar street on the side of the river we’d been spending most of our time on.  Thankfully, the bars were almost all in one small cluster, and ended at a small shrine to a local deity.  My lovely wife said the sign identified the shrine as belonging to the god of dirt.  I think hope she must have mistranslated this somehow.  The rest of the way was mostly shops, hotels, and restaurants.

One shop featured a large statue of a pig, proudly holding a bag from the shop.  It turns out that the shop sold pig meat.  I’d love to put a sign at the base of the statue saying “I sold my family and friends and got enough money to buy back parts of them here.” 

 

 

Speaking of pigs, dried pig faces were somewhat common around town.  I saw them in shops selling meat as well as in front of restaurants.  One of the restaurants on the same street as the hotel had put a Japanese headband on the pig face.  I guess that the disagreements between China and Japan include dried meat too.

 

 

The hotel was much farther down that I thought it would be.  We checked the rooms on the first floor (too accessible from the riverfront sidewalk using nothing more than a short stepladder), and the 3rd floor (the roof’s eves compressed the view above the balcony railing into a narrow slit.  This left the (currently occupied) second floor as the optimal place to stay.  The owners assured us that at least one of the pair of second floor rooms would be available on Friday.

The view was exceptionally nice in one direction.  A beautiful bridge, built in traditional style.

 

 

The other way had a much lower bridge over a small spillway dam in the river.  It turns out the optimal way to move our luggage to the hotel would be to take a taxi from the old hotel and then cross the river using the bigger bridge.

 

 

Then came the sales pitch from the hotel owners.  “We can get you discount tickets to a campfire show on Friday night and to a Miao village on Saturday.”  I was informed the campfire show had some form of singing and dancing, and that they could get us seats in front.  The Miao village tour would require us to leave at about 9 am on Saturday, with no way to return until around 4:30 pm.

I managed to restrain my lovely wife into just getting the Friday evening show tickets so we could look up the options for different villages on Saturday (there were several available).  Also, as much as I’d love to see a Miao village, I knew we’d have to pack (again) on Saturday evening and we’d also be looking to head back to areas we’d seen to pick up a few things.

Since we were already in unexplored territory, we decided to press onward with an eye towards crossing the river farther downstream.

The center part of the spillway bridge was high and dry.  The parts on either side were submerged and the water was a little too deep and fast to make me feel like risking a crossing.  The good news was that the rain had finally reduced from a steady downpour to on and off drizzles.

We finally got outside the extremely touristy areas.  The one item on the map for tourists this far out was the grave and memorial of Shen Congwen.  He was an author whose book about Feng Huang made the town famous.  I expected a nice plaque and perhaps some carvings.  Instead, it was a small park, complete with paths going far up a hill, crossing and recrossing streams flowing from springs.

 

 

 

We decided to press on and cross at a “hopping bridge”.  This one consisted of meter-wide stone steps that were about 30 cm across with 30 cm gaps between them for the river to flow through.  There was one small problem.  The boards that bridged the gaps wide enough for boats to get through on each end were missing (washed away in the flooding).  The gap on one end was far too wide.

 

 

The one at the other end was potentially within my ability to leap, but anything short of an absolutely perfect landing would be a very very bad thing.  We decided to go a little farther downriver to the next car bridge to finally get a chance to explore the far side of the river.

Heading back upriver, we stopped across from the new hotel.  While looking at it, I conceived of a cunning set of balcony plans.  Using the zoom on my camera, I found I could take reasonably good photos of the balconies on the opposite side.  Now it was just a matter of convincing my super-lovely wife to cooperate.  The plan was to wait until after we’d moved in.  Then I would head back across the river (using a much closer bridge) call her, and have her step outside onto the balcony (while neglecting to be dressed ).  I estimated that anyone not currently set up for photography would first have to spot her (amidst many balconies on all the hotels in that area), aim a camera, and zoom in to get any detail.  Since I’d already have the hotel room centered and zoomed in, that should give me about a 15 second window of time to take pics before she would run back inside.  After all, it’s the least she could do after forcing me to pack up and move to a different part of town.  Ahhh… something to look forward to. 

 

 

At one of the tables (not a shop or even a stand, but a table), I spotted something unusual.  It was a pair of small 3 legged items very similar to the unusual baijiu bottle I’d spotted earlier.  It turns out that these were some form of ancient traditional baijiu cups.  The drawback – the price was 25 kuai each, and the woman wouldn’t budge below 20 each.  I noted the location and decided I’d go back later – unless I could find them cheaper elsewhere.

For those wanting to see a bit of classic Chinese culture, there were quite a few fishing birds along the far side of the river.

 

 

We were going to cross the river and head back the way we came, but it was easier to take a taxi from town back to our first hotel (but cost 15 kuai).  I then got to spend some quality time figuring out how to pack all of our stuff in a way that would let us have access to everything we’d need in the new hotel while minimize repacking on Saturday night. 

 

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