guiyang

we got to guiyang in the afternoon and walked around for a really long time trying to find a decent place to stay that wasn't too expensive. we finally happened upon the china post hotel. it was 138 yuan, which is the most we've paid in china. but we were hot and tired and probably fighting because we always do when we're looking for accommodation. but we got there! and we ate at street stalls that night, which was good and made up for the really expensive hotel. the room was pretty worn looking and the whole carpet was damp. it was gross. then a huge cockroach walked across the floor and foo saw it and panicked a lot. so funny. so i killed it with my shoe and as we usually do with gross bugs, we covered it up (with the ashtray in the room) and just left it on the floor. it seems like something that the hotel staff should know about. the next morning we woke up and ate you tiao and soybean milk for breakfast. i love this stuff. you tiao (pronounced like 'yo tee ow' is like a fried dough stick. like a long doughnut sort of, only not sweet. and you dip it into soymilk til it gets a little soggy then you eat it. it doesn't sound that great i guess, but it's actually really really good. so we ate delicious you tiao. and on the way back to the china post hotel, we saw a building that had a sign in chinese (thank goodness for nancyfoo!) that said there was a hotel on the sixth floor of this giant building. seriously? yes! we went up to the sixth floor and indeed there was a hotel. we saw the rooms, which were much nicer than the stupid cockroach china post hotel. and cheaper. and it was only a block or two away. so we checked in and went to check out of the china post hotel. that evening we met up with this chinese boy named sijun (but he said to call him andy). i found him on couchsurfing.com. he couldn't host us, but he said he could hang out. he owns a bar, so he took us there first. it is called '80s bar'. he had his waiter get three big bottles of beer. they are only 3% alcohol, so this was very doable. also, china bars don't really have mixed drinks. only beer. sijun said that if there is hard liquor, it is fake. i don't know how that works, but anyway...after his bar, he took us to eat a guiyang specialty, called ........ it involves little circles of bread, but really thin. like a tiny super thin tortilla. and you wrap veggies, pickles, meats, bean sprouts, nuts, all kinds of things in them. and put some delicious sauce on it, and wrap it together like a baby, hence the name. it was a messy meal for me. i need to practice those.
sijun is a gay boy, so after that he took us to the gay man bar. we had soooo much fun! it's called the daily dish i think. and again, you can only order beer. but here you order cans, and you have to order a minimum of 6 cans at a time. chinese gay boys are really shy about dancing. i could tell they wanted to. all bopping in their seats. i could tell these boys secretly wanted to act like gay boys. and i got many of them to dance with me! we had many cans of expensive beer and i think one boy had a crush on foo til he realized she was a girl, at which point he exclaimed this revelation quite loudly in broken english, then acted all disgusted. it was really really funny. we went home pretty late. and woke up soon after to take a 24 hour train ride to go to hong kong!