The first trouble

It finally happened, all the stories we heard about pickpockets and the like finally reared their ugly heads at us! On our trip back to Liuzhou on one of our favorite types of transport, the minibus, Elizabeth almost got pickpocketed! We both fell asleep on the ride back to Liuzhou when Elizabeth woke for no appearant reason; when she looked to her right, she noticed the guy across the aisle sitting a little too close to her for her liking. For some reason she reached for her wallet and found it on the way out of her pants through a series of slits that she had acquired while sleeping. She woke me immediately and handed the wallet to me. The guy immediately began to defend himself and blamed the attempted crime on the men who were sitting across from us before we dozed off. Because of our surprise, we gave the chap the benefit of the doubt, but he continued on with his aliby and suddenly, a pair of scissors appeared on the floor next to him. He tried to tell us that the men had left and dropped them on the way out the door. We found this highly unlikely but because we didn't really see anything and the language barrier we kept it low key... that and nothing was stolen. We figured it was him because we noticed he seemed to make eye and verbal contact with two other men on the bus and after we had been awakened, instead of sitting next to us innocently, he moved! Big tip off. One of his cronies moved to the front of the bus and sat next to my pack so I moved up there as well. He tried to tell me he needed air which was why he moved, but most of the windows throughout the bus were opened. The pants slasher got off a few minutes later with the man in the back of the bus (the lookout in our opinion) and the other fella was left on his own... basically harmless from here on out.

Back in Liuzhou, we grabbed a bite to eat and then phoned Andy and Sarah who asked us to stay the night with them. We gladly obliged since our guidebook gave little help on accomodations in Liuzhou. There's a tailor in their apartment complex who stiched up Elizabeth's pants almost good as new!

In the morning, we headed to the market to grab our fresh ingredients for the much awaited cookout. The markets in this part of the world are massive and everyone shops for their fresh meats and vegetables daily. It's good fun, but afterwards, we took a walk to the live market. We'd seen a live market in Xi'an but it wasn't as hardcore as this one. There were cats, dogs, frogs, fish, chickens, etc all caged and ready for the table. We took pictures in Xi'an of the live animals that are traditional food, but we couldn't bring ourselves to taking a photo of the dogs and cats awaiting the dinner table. It was pathetic to see them, but it is a different world over here.

The evening we headed to Long Tan Park and had a great kabob cookout and Dave turned out to be the man of the hour in my eyes because he possessed a frisbee! Most of the crowd headed out after several hours of eating and drinking beer (surprise!) but I accompanied Dave to the town square to meet a few of his Western friends. There was one in particular, Ken, who reminded me of Dudley Moore as Arthur, but older and crankier. He had an opinion about everything, most of them wrong in my eyes, but none the less and opinion. We drank a few more beers and debated for an hour or so and then headed back to the flat. We took it easy for the rest of the night because we had to pack and head out the next day to get ready for Vietnam!