Back from
Guilin! The place is absolutely GORGEOUS - the views, the weather, everything. I'd heard loads about Guilin and wanted to travel there, but never got a chance to. So it's just fantastic that eBay brought all staff there.. flying everyone in from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, etc. It was for 2.5 days, but unfortunately, we ended up travelling for almost 10 hours.. d'oh! Our flight was massively, massively delayed due to a "maintenance issue". Argh! They did feed us all lunchboxes though. And then on the plane, they gave us lunch on the plane as well, *lol*. That meant 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches.... and then 2 dinners later on ;)
We didn't arrive at Guilin will evening, just in the nick of time for dinner. Sadness, since we were planning to do a bit of sight seeing beforehand. The dinner banquet was a huge affair, with fun games and such. It's amazing how eBay goes all out here. In Australia we wouldn't get anything close :P It was around 10 courses of food, though I found quite a few dishes a bit strange (or rather, unidentified). Many others felt the same way, so after dinner, we decided we needed ANOTHER one down the road ;)
Down the road is one large street, that is the epicentre of activity in the small sleepy town. It's littered with shopfronts, cafes and bars. And it is
pumping! Tons and tons of people walking around, eating and shopping. Very fun, and quite surreal since once you step outside this street it's totally empty.
Here, we chowed down on....
pizza. All because of I reaaaalllyyyy felt like some pizza :P Considering this is a tiny little Chinese town, the pizza was really good - crusty base and lots of cheese plus tons of ingredients. We ordered SO MUCH food! Our 2nd banquet dinner in one day ;) And this was when I tried
Guilin mifen (aka rice noodles) for the first time. It came in a thin metal bowl, sprinkled with some sour green beans, thin pork slices, pickled veggies and peanuts. And it is GOOD. I love anything that's super local, basically streetfood. It was tasty, though I chose mine with "no stinky tofu".. a lot of Chinese love the stuff but it stinks to high heavens (like mouldy smelly socks - seriously) so none for me thanks. Guess how much my bowl of noodles was?
4元 (USA$0.60)!!!! Stuff is so cheap in Guilin it's incredible.
Waiting at the airport..... for 4 hours. D'OH!

2.5hour flight later, we then had a 1.5hr ride to the little town

The eBay welcome table - it was a very welcome sight indeed after 10 hours of travel!

Inside the room - small but nice

The bathroom had an awesome mega rain-shower in the ceiling. Yay!

We were all given goodybags of snacks. Awesome :)

In the big banquet hall

Performances up on stage. Was a great night :)

Strange little taxi-buses type things

The major (there's only one) street here - PACKED with people

And lots of little stalls selling trinkets

Shops, cafes and nightclubs galore!

Looking down on some of the street whilst we ate our 2nd dinner

Local beer - it was fab

Food, glorious food!

PIZZA. It was delicious.

The famous Guilin noodles!

