Crowded city!

04.04.2014

I was really looking forward to going to this place, because the guy in the Lonely Planet wrote so much about it. However, I don't think he actually went to either of the places I visited today. Unless there was a recent explosion of tourism in the area, it was nothing like he described it. There were insane amounts of people jostling me around all day long, as I tried not to fall into the waterways (think Venice but twice as crowded) There were also way more vendors selling the usual crap trinkets and other things to buy. For a while I felt like I paid 60 yuan just to walk around in a clump of thousands of people and be sold things....

Once I got away from the crowds and could breathe a little bit easier, I could see the scenery I was meant to see, the kind that was written about in the book. But that was quite difficult to do. Interestingly, and maybe disgustingly for some of you, there was a spring of water at the very back of the city. One guy was there filling up his water bottle and drinking it. I was SO skeptical and a little frightened, but I filled up my water bottle too and drank a mouthful. It was DELICIOUS. I waited a few hours before I drank the rest just in case it made me sick haha. But on the bus back home, it was still cool thanks to the insulation in my water bottle, and STILL DELICIOUS! This was something I did not expect to do in China.

I wanted to try to go to one more village that day, but there weren't any more buses going to the one I wanted to go to. So, I went back to Jingdezhen a day early. I was just in time for the last bus back.

When I got back, the lady in the red sweater was there and she took me back to her nice hotel again. I went for a tofu dinner across the street and met a Japanese man who spoke English in a French accent (but didn't speak French!) what... I dunno.

In the morning, I left my bus ticket in my room! Oh horror of horrors! I didn't realize this until after I ate breakfast. I ran back to the hotel, and the man who runs the hotel with his wife was yelling at me, but I couldn't quite figure out what he was trying to say. I know he was saying PIAO PIAO which is ticket, so I wasn't worried. He was pointing in the direction of the bus station so I ran there and found his wife, of course, with my ticket in her hand. It was a nice way to end a rather disappointing weekend.

I got on the bus and some university students immediately latched on to me and started chattering at me in English which was not so bad, so I had something to entertain me on the way home. We hit a crazy amount of traffic and ended up spending 10 hours on what should've been a seven hour bus ride.

Ladies making dumplings