Guilin - Day 2

The tutor we had “booked” turns out to be a 13 year old child! Not the 18 year old that I had expected with some experience in teaching. Sigh… we anyway head out to the Children’s Palace, a center that was set up by one of the Soong sisters. They are set up all over China and this one had a confusing array of classes for kids from 3 up to 18, from ping pong, wushu, calligraphy, English, Chinese painting, cartooning to dancing, musical instruments etc. We met with the headmaster and she got us a teacher to show us 3 classes. One of them was Wushu, where the older kids showed off their bamboo stick and sword skills, one particular fatty boy was very cute, he was a gymnast and could move very fast.

We paid for the whole semester but would probably take up only 4 classes. Luckily the fees are very affordable. If we stayed the whole semester, it could be fun to be in the foreign speaking class.

We met a nice taxi guy that became our guide for the rest of the trip and we went to one of the caves. Guilin was under the ocean million years ago and has topography like Vietnam, lots of limestone caves. The Chinese however like to light up their caves in many multi colored lights with strange sounding names for the staglatite and staglamite formations. We manage to buy some fruit on the way back. The amount of tourists that trek through is quite large such that the cave floors are paved. Nothing like the caves in S. Africa where we have to duck around and the floors are natural, no fancy, tacky, colored lights there too…

After a nap and avoiding the heat (its hot here! ut apparently it was raining a lot the week before), we take the public double decker bus to the popular area in the city. We manage to find a good sale on Chinese workbooks and headed to a recommended place for dinner that turned out to be very typically Chinese – lots of people and very noisy.