Huangling village

21.08.2015

In the morning, my clothes were still wet and still stinking. My white shirt had also become stained yellow from my sarong. Oh well. I left them on the line for the weekend, hoping they'd be better on Sunday.

We met Doreen's friends for breakfast of another bowl of Jiangxi noodles with beef. I got some sauce in my eye and it was so spicy that I couldn't even open it for a while. Doreen noticed and then everyone started to panic. They brought me to the washroom where there was only a hose and bucket for a sink.

"Oh no, too difficult," I said and ran back to my seat to avoid causing anymore panic.

When we arrived at the Wuyuan train station we were whisked away by Doreen's father's driver. Her family owns a big hotel downtown and we dropped our bags off before we headed to the Huangling village

It was an hour's drive away and I spent the day wandering around and watching the ladies take photos. I felt like I was on that TV show Entourage. We travelled around in a pack and everything was comped. We showed up at the back entrance and Doreen paid for everything.

The village was really nicely restored and the most unique part about it was that the villagers would dry their harvest in the sun on planks stuck out from their upstairs windows. They didn't have a lot of flat land, so this was their solution.

There were also two pedestrian bridges that went nowhere, and a zipline which I politely declined by saying, "I'll watch you!"

It was raining when we left, so we didn't go swimming. We had time for a nap before dinner and Doreen's friend's party. I had a bathtub in my room (luxury!) so I sat in there until the water got cold. I was just out of the bath, enjoying some complimentary green tea, when Doreen knocked on the door all ready to go.

We had a fantastic meal with green dumplings (which I had already sampled last year in Wuyuan) and my favourite of the night, pumpkin mashed up with green beans. Sounds gross, but it's awesome.

Then we went off to the party, but it wasn't much of one. Everyone was silent, laying around on the astroturf of the ultra modern home, watching some random Bollywood movie. Weird. Doreen's friends were just about to open a new hostel, so they showed us the rooms and the entourage was visibly bored, so we all left.

We drove down to the main square, where Doreen's friends rented a bike with Christmas lights on it, so they could pedal around town and everyone would look at them I guess???

Just off the square, was a beer garden doing honest to god, American style karaoke, with beer towers and everything. It was about $2 to request a song, but I had to do it anyway. The first song I recognized on the tiny English song list was Drive by Incubus. So that's what I sang. We drank a lot more beer after that and more of Doreen's friends arrived with random takeout and empty cups to fill.

We went home at about 11 p.m. again and I had a nice sleep in my hotel bed.

Rice fields for Jeremy