eat drink seth liz

We've just learned that it's a lot harder to blog after the vacation, but we'll give it our best shot. We're starting with some snapshots of our time in Istanbul to kick things off and get us motivated.


As always, we love the funny signs.




Here are some shots of the spice market, around town, and a whirling dervish. More to come tomorrow when were both awake.

After two months, we were ready to leave the construction noise and crowds of Shanghai and set off on a week long adventure.  Using her limited Chinese, and an assortment of travel books, Liz worked hard to plan the perfect getaway with sporty outdoors activities, adorable villages, and luxury pampering.  We finally settled on a trip to the village of Ping An and the town of Yangshuo. 

Despite Liz's efforts, many important details were lost in translation. For Instance:  Our hotel, the beautiful LiQing guest house is not accessible by car. We only discovered this important detail at 2am when, after 3 hours of driving and several flight delays our driver parked his car along the rocky shoulder of an isolated dirt road.  Sleepy eyed, we pulled our luggage out of the cab's trunk and asked the driver to point us towards our hotel.  He flipped on his flashlight and pointed it at a seemingly endless mountainside stone staircase. Guided by our driver and his tiny flashlight, we hauled our luggage up the mountain.  After twenty minutes we finally stumbled into our hotel room and collapsed on our our impossibly hard beds.   (In the next day's light we saw that we were walking along sheer cliffs!)

Ping An is a cute village stacked in layers up the side of a mountain along the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces.  

Early in the morning, we took off on a hike from the rice terrace village of Ping An to the equally beautiful rice terraces of Dazhai. We struggled to find our way using the best map the internet had to offer: a hand-drawn approximation of the surrounding villages.  After about an hour, we encountered a giant bulldozer building an inter-village bypass. Just as Liz was about to insist we turn around and find another route, a grandmotherly minority woman popped out from behind the bulldozer and guided us to her village for lunch, which she said was a good midpoint in the hike.

Her house was huge and mostly empty, except for a fabulous entertainment center complete with color TV, satellite dish, and DVD & VCR players.  Other parts of the house weren't as advanced, e.g., the kitchen was basically an empty room with a fire pit and wok.  She cooked us lunch with her grandson on her lap.  She apparently supports a family of 4 with her magnetic personality and novel bargaining technique (Chinese-English translation courtesy Liz):

Seth: That lunch was delicious!  So, uh, how much do we, uh, owe you...?

Minority Grandma: How much would lunch be in Ping An?  Pay what you think is fair.

Seth: Ok, how's $10?  

Minority Grandma: (Shaking head) I don't think so...

Seth: $15?

Minority Grandma: (Shaking head) I'm afraid not...

At this point Liz intervened and bought several of her tchotchkes to smooth things over.

Slideshow: After lunch we walked through the notoriously beautiful 500 year old rice terraces from the Ming Dynasty.  (Interesting fun fact: dogs eat rice right off the stalk.)

In Dazhai we took a couple buses back to our hotel in Ping An.  We had one of the local specialties: chicken and mushrooms fire-roasted in a fat cylinder of bamboo.

The next day we took buses from Ping An to Yangshuo via Longshen and Guilin.  Actually we never got to Longshen.  On our way the bus driver stopped and waved down a bus going in the opposite direction.  He pointed and said "that's your bus."  Apparently the drivers get on the radio and plan your whole itinerary.  Cool, eh?

We stayed several nights a short walk up the river from Yangshuo at the Li River Retreat, a hotel run by an Australian expat with a can-do attitude.  (We know what you're thinking!  Are there any Australian expats without can-do attitudes?)  Yangshuo is known for its striking karst mountains, which are the improbably tall and skinny mountains you've seen in ink paintings or the 20RMB note.

Slideshow: Our Yanghuo itinerary: 1. Enjoy the view of some karst outside our hotel, 2. take a cooking class, 3. Go to the light show on the Li River, directed by Zhang Yimou of Olympics opening/closing ceremonies fame, 4. hike from Yangdi to Xingping in the karst mountains, 5. bike from Yangshuo to Liugong, eat lunch at the notoriously good restaurant on the river, 6. hang out with the cormorant fisherman.  (Unfamiliar with cormorant fishing?  It's simple: tie a string tightly around a cormorant's neck; throw him in the water; grab him when he's swallowed a fish, turn him upside down and shake the fish out.)

We are back in the states and slowly winning the war against jet lag.  Our adventures in the Middle Kingdom our over but we still have one or two blog posts to release.  So stay tuned.

And now for something completely different:

We found this pair during our hike through the karst peaks of Yangshuo.  We thought we captured a viral video moment. Unfortunately we were scooped by the Huffington Post's animal adoption videos.    What a  coincidence!

Like most communist countries, China has a central authoritarian figure. This big brother is plastered on billboards and modeled in plastic statues all over the city. We never escaped his gaze, his wild pompadour, and his insane smile. He is the omnipresent Haibao and he's watching you.

Haibao is the mascot of Shanghai's World's Fair. (aka the Expo)

This shot is of the fabulous pavilion constructed for the upcoming Expo. So goes the story, they are also working on fifteen hundred roads, digging new subway lines, and constructing thousands of buildings, all in time for the Expo. Everyone estimates that millions of tourist will flock to this city for this big event. Can anyone tell us what happens at a world's fair nowadays?

In this Slideshow: All Haibao, all the time.

We are currently in Yangshuo. We'll post of few blogposts about our adventures when we get back the states. Look forward to seeing the next viral cat video: this one will blow away the Cat-On-The-Roomba and the Hamster-On-A-Piano videos. We love your comments!

Fellow Travelers, Here is our guide to the Lujiabang Fabric Market (Nanpu Bridge subway stop line 8)

Friends and Family, let us know what you think about our fabulous new outfits.

We visited Lujiabang fabric market four times during our two month stay in Shanghai. The market's three floors of small stalls filled with bulk rolls of silk, linen, wool are undeniably tantalizing. The maze is dizzying, but after several visits we got the hang of it.

Here are a few tips....

• Get off the first floor asap. The 2nd and 3rd floors are quieter and nicer.


• Look for established stalls. We liked several of the the large corner stalls.  Ask for a business cards to help you figure out who's the head honcho.


• Bring something they can copy! This is not absolutely necessary but it is a huge help. Most stalls are excellent at copying.  The clothing we had made from stall samples needed a refitting or two, but everyone nailed copies on their first try.


• Don't ask for anything too complicated.  We stuck to simple men's dress shirts and jackets, flowing women's skirts with basic waist lines, and classic long coats. Be warned: we saw several examples of suits-gone-bad and their unhappy owners.

Here are specific stall recommendations with pictures of their handy work....

3rd Floor Stall Number 332  This stall made Seth's black linen jacket. It's a gorgeous fit but it took them three tries to get it right. This is a picture of the second try.

YangYongGang 3F No. 389 Corner stall next to the button people. This is an excellent stall. They got everything right on the first try.  We bought several linen shirts and linen pants for Seth and a cashmere coat for Liz.  (More pictures of their work in the slide show.)

3F No. 301-302  This corner stall has one of the widest selections of silk.  They
designed Liz's paneled skirt without a copy and, after one refitting, Liz
was ready to go out on the town. 

Ray 3F No. 349  Liz's Green Jacket. This Stall had a few interesting fabrics. They took tons of measurements and tailored a model Liz chose from the store. They didn't need a copy.

2F No. 281  This
stall has beautiful fabrics. They were unable to make a skirt without a
copy, but they did a great job copying the skirt from stall 3F-301. They
even improved the fit.

Lujiabang is filled with specialty stalls including this one which we thought was either intended for five year-olds or hookers but as it turns out they design dance outfits.

It's All About The Buttons. Liz objected to the cheap plastic buttons on Seth's linen shirts and insisted he pay extra for quality buttons from the button shop. The tailor switched them out in a jiffy.

Check out Seth's pink and orange linen shirts. What do you think of the buttons?

In this slide show: Liz bargains, gets fitted, peruses, then tries things on for size.

In this slide show: Stalls, Stalls, Glorious Stalls.

We leave for Guilin in a few hours and we return to Michigan in one week. Check back in a few days for a time release post. Then check back in about a weekfor our final blog posts about our hiking adventure

Fellow travelers,

Honestly we wished someone taught us this the second we got off the plane. It would have helped so much. The Chinese use hand signals to count from one to ten on one hand.  You don't have to worry about tones.  You don't have to memorize words.  Just get these hand signals down and you can bargain like a pro. 1 through 5 are more or less the same, but a lot of people count three starting from the pinky. Six through ten are totally different.



Six through ten in order