Day 7: The Gardens of Guilin

One of the Exhibits at Shanghai Museum
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Last night, we had the opportunity to see the famous Shanghai acrobatic show. It was a pretty good performance by the local Shanghai dance troupe. A lot like Cirque du soleil but at about half their prices.

After the show, we drove around town for a bit seeing Shanghai at night – especially around the Bund and around Nanjing Road (Shanghai’s Times Square). The Chinese sure have a penchant for bright neon lights. Nanjing Street reminded me of New York only more gaudy and garish as these weren’t the lights of a theatre district but instead the billboards were all commercial advertising for various cars, gadgets, fashion and other consumer products.

Guilin was everything it promised to be. The change of scenery from packed urban buildings to sprawling greenery and calming lakeview was so refreshing.

Shanghai Museum
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This morning, after a quick checkout, we set off to see the Shanghai Museum. This was a worthwhile stop as the museum had some interesting displays. Most importantly, the museum had those audio machine thingies that you can walk around with. Most exhibits have a number and when you punch in that number, the audio gadget tells you about that exhibit in an unaccented English. It was such a joy to listen to English as we’re accustomed to hearing it. I was suddenly homesick.

Our next stop is Guilin, China’s most scenic city and we had nothing on the agenda there except a lot of rest and relaxation and I welcome that.

The lake city of Guilin
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Guilin was everything it promised to be.  The change of scenery from packed urban buildings to sprawling greenery and calming lakeview was so refreshing. We had no plans for the evening except to catch up on some much needed R & R.

While in Guilin, we also dropped in to say hello to the staff at China Odyssey Tours , our local travel agent in China that arranged all our accommodations and itinerary.  I was surprised to see how young their team is.  Our own travel consultant (Vera Zhao) was barely in her twenties.  They did a great job with our trip and they were exceptionally hospitable to us when we visited them, giving us gifts and souvenirs to take home.  Missy took a photo with some of the girls.

View from our hotel room at the Sheraton Guilin
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After showering and getting comfortable we decided to venture to the local bazzar to eat something.  The bazaar was a noisy, colourful marketplace with vendors selling everything from local souvenirs to fake designer goods to pirated dvd's.  We were shocked to find all the leading english films for as little as $2 to $3 and entire seasons of popular TV shows for $15 to $20.

I was almost out of chinese currency by this time and, for some reason, it was a challenge to get money out of the many ATM's with local banks.  In the end, the easiest way was to get cdn dollars converted at the hotel's reception.  I actually got a much better rate there than I did when I changed money in Canada.  The hotel in Guilin gave us 7RMB for a Canadian dollar - which was a pretty decent rate!

The staff at China Odyssey Tours - Our travel agents in China
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Another challenge was our suitcase - it was literally tearing at the seams (yeah, so i'd been shopping!).  When we saw a luggage store in the market, we were able to bargain for a pretty decent sized suitcase (it would have easily cost close to $60 in Winners) and bring the Vendor down from 300 RMB (approx $42) that he wanted to 100 RMB (about $14).  I think it's a pretty good deal and a fine bag!  We hauled the bag with all our shopping back to our hotel.

After enjoying a nice chinese meal at a local restaurant we walked back to our hotel and decided to take an early night as we had an early start the next day when we took a river boat cruise along the Li River.