Today was our day to split from the group. Many of the other families also left at this point to visit their childs' orphanage. We were skipping Guilin to go to Sarah's hometown. I heard that Guilin was very beautiful, but we did not have enough time to do both. So, after breakfast in the hotel, we had to bring our luggage down to the bus. We were splitting after lunch, so we had to gave our stuff together before we left for our morning tour. Our tour today was to Huanglongxi, and old village in Chengdu. It turned out to be a great little place, with lots of vendors and shops. They had a place where you could try on "Imperial" outfits and have your picture made. I wish I had figured that out sooner, I would have had the girls do it. Samantha got a lollypop made out of burnt sugar; Sarah got some skewers of chicken (extra spicy)! It was pretty tasty.
Another group dinner on the second floor of a restaurant in town, and we were pulled away from the group to take a taxi to the airport. We had a pretty short flight (less than 2 hours) to XiNing. Our guide Tim, met us there and got us to our hotel. He told us that we had the next day free and would go to the orphanage on Wednesday, August 3. He offered to take us shopping the next day if we called him.
We got into our room and discovered that there was no wireless internet. I went downstairs to ask the front desk about it and, surprise!, no one speaks English!!! Gotta love it. The people at the front desk ended up calling Tim, our guide, to get him to translate over the phone! It was pretty funny. Anyway, turns out we had wired internet, not wireless, so the maintenance guy came to the room and got us hooked up. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Never did figure out if the government or the hotel was playing with us! We were a pretty easy target since I'm sure I was the only caucasian woman within a 500+ mile area. We did get some looks. Samantha was very uncomfortable with it. I tried to explain that the people were just curious. Everyone was very friendly. The difference in XiNing than the other cities was that there is a very large Muslim population there. We even passed a mosque - I missed taking a picture. Really wish I had gotten it!
Since dinner was on our own the first night, we walked down the street about 3 or 4 spots and found a little convenience store. We ended up with noodles, oreos, beer, orange soda, and some peppercorns to bring back for a friend. Total cost; about $5.00 US.
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