China Dispatch - More Guilin

Our second day in Guilin, we needed desperately to get away from this guy:

So we decided to wander around and explore the city on our own. This is what we typically do, but a lot of the sites that we wanted to see in China just ended up being easier to get to with a guided tour, so we ended up doing a lot more of those than I think all of us would have liked.

Now let's talk about food.....

We walked a couple of blocks from our hotel where we had seen a food market the night before to search for some yummy street food. No luck... The street market was only at night. But we did find sticky buns.

AWWW!! Sticky Buns! They were little meat filled dough buns from heaven:

We were still hungry so we kept on walking and found a noodle shop: Where the guy was making the noodles right there: We then went to a place called Solitary Beauty peak which was a peak that you could climb to see really beautiful views of the city.

Here is the peak: And here are the views: The climb was kind of steep: so we rewarded ourselves with ice cream once we got down to the bottom: We then walked over to the Seven Stars scenic area, and scenic it was:

There was the promise of more beautiful views and a pagoda at the top this peak:

So we decided to climb it. We got to the top and all that you could see were tree tops. We kinda wanted to die... It was so friggen hot, and this was our second peak climb of the day: Deana collapsed from exhaustion: But once we climbed down we ran into this little guy: And then this little guy: And we were happy again and ready to go find dinner. We found more various mystery meats on a stick and dumplings that tasted like Thanksgiving stuffing. They were all so good that I made up a song about them: We then made our way back to the hotel. Along the way Deana found two kindred hair spirits:

Oh... If Michael and I ever decide to renew our wedding vows, we're totally wearing these:

Up next... Our final day in Guilin and then we fly to Chengdu.