Stopover in Xiangcheng

Cathal in our guesthouse in Xiangcheng.
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We were to spend just one night in Xiancheng.  We got off the bus and there was an old lady holding up a framed sign. Written in English was something like this... "do you need a place to stay? I have Tibetan House, please follow me" Well that was fairly unambiguous so we did. She led us into the bus ticket office and waited outside. We were confused, we stood there for a bit, the guy behind the desk ignored us so we went back out. On hindsight I think she was giving us a chance to get our ticket for the next day since the office had really odd opening hours we later discovered. Anyway we followed her to a lovely large house.

The Tibetan-style house in which we stayed, Xiangcheng.
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The ground floor was solely used for storage of wood, dried meat and bits and bobs. We went upstairs to look at the room. It was a lovely brightly painted room. The walls were wooden with panels showing different scenes - yaks, mountains, flowers and incongruously a kangaroo!  We bargained her down to 40 yuan and set off to find some food.

Each utterance set them off into fits of giggles

We went into a little restaurant, showed the lady our magic note and pretty soon, she had Cathal by the hand and in the kitchen. He was shown an onion, a tomato, an aubergine and an egg. So we ended up with an enormous mound of egg fried rice with tomato and aubergine. Very tasty it was too.

We were facing another mammoth bus journey the following day so we needed to find supplies. Using our phrase book we stopped two ladies who were carrying buckets and showed them the word for supermarket. One of the ladies tried to tell us something. We just grinned at her idiotically and she shrugged, put down her buckets and walked us down the road. We walked about 10 minutes before we came to a small mini mart. Brilliant. We thanked her profusely, she smiled and set off to retrieve her buckets.

Suitably supplied our next task was to find an internet cafe. Through a series of mimes we found a room full of computers on the second floor of a large restaurant. We were there about half an hour and realised the noise from the next room was getting louder. We peered in and discovered there was a huge children's party going on. Once the kids discovered the Lao Wei it was all over. We had about ten tots gathered round us watching what we were doing. We smiled. Big mistake, they just got more confident. Suddenly they all started all yelling "hello", "good morning", "what's your name" etc. Each utterance set them off into fits of giggles. When we replied they just lost it. Then the really little ones would try to approximate what was being said, they'd slap their hands over their mouths and run next door. It was amusing for the first 15 minutes.  But 20 kids screaming hello at the top of their lungs repeatedly gets a bit wearing when you're just trying to email home. Thankfully they then went off to get food and one of the other internet using guys shut the doors, so they couldn't get back in!