the funniest day in china!

i forgot to write about this with the china stuff, but it was sooo terrible and funny. here is what foo wrote about it:
from guilin, we went to the longji rice terraces which was pretty amazing. we decided against a tour and took a series of buses there ourselves which wasn’t as complicated as we thought it was going to be. we had left most of our stuff in guilin and only taken enough to stay the night at the terraces. our goal was to hike to a village 4-5 hours away and stay the night. on our way to da zai, we met a group of minority hill tribe women who talked us into staying at their village which was halfway to da zai. after hiking in the heat for several hours and feeling drained from that, we decided to give it a shot, thinking that they seemed nice and cute enough. wrong. the room we slept in belonged to one of the women. nice enough. but for the same price, we had stayed in real rooms with attached bathrooms and such. then came dinner which was simple but delicious. it was rice accompanied by 5 dishes of various stir-fried vegetables that they had cooked using vegetables harvested from their garden. i felt good about that. while we were eating dinner, all the women were crafting and were excited about showing us their wares after dinner so we could see what we would like to buy. great. sure enough, after dinner, they brought out EVERYTHING they had. coasters, wall hangings, wallets, jewelry, table clothes, etc. i’m not sure if they made everything. the jewelry definitely looked too refined but i also don’t know anything about hill tribe women goods. short story is that we told them we had a specific amount of money – we didn’t budget for buying a whole bunch of stuff. there was a discussion about how much we needed to pay for dinner which we weren’t expecting because we thought that the price we were paying included dinner. wrong again. they wanted us to pay what we thought was fair. and what we thought was fair was much lower than what they wanted because they wanted us to pay restaurant prices. not fair. in the end, we only had enough money to pay for sleeping there and for dinner. they didn’t believe that we didn’t have any money and kept asking if we had a hundred yuan because they would provide change. it was an intense situation. but it ended with us not buying any crafts from them, going to bed early and sneaking away at 5.45 the next morning.