of mice and men and mercury
by Rach
Yangshuo, China
Down West Street, which until recently was called Foreigner Street, and for good reason, you can buy a t-shirt with a relevant picture and Mickey Maos written on it. You can eat at the Mickey Maos cafe and until a few days ago you could visit the Minnie Maos Cafe too, but that’s now being demolished to make way for the golden arches of McDonalds. Beautiful strokes of irony all round!
And our mice? Well, they followed us from our couchsurfing in Hanoi and are enjoying their mountain retreat….although today they were reminiscing of the city as they were turned into cars. For quite some time they honk-honk-honked along the balcony. Our children have never played with cars so noisily before 😉 (By the way, Yangshuo has its own vehicle etiquette…..if you, the pedestrian, position yourself anywhere near the curb, all traffic approaching on both sides of the road will honk. This is not a friendly let-you-know-I’m-here honk – it’s a challenging don’t-you-dare-step-in-front-of-me honk. However, there is very little traffic and so waiting for a gap in it requires no patience whatsoever).
That was the mice.
As for the men, we’ve been considering the contributions made by Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton and Semmelweis, not to mention Mao Tsetung and Sun Yatsen. We’ve also been watching Men At Work around here.
(check out our personal tout, the man who has cooked for us twice a day and our private musician who plays us Amazing Grace and Freire Jacques off key every time we walk along the street 😉 )
And the mercury. Barely in double figures when we arrived, and accompanied by humidity so high it left our tiled floors and the cobble-stoned streets wet and slippery, it only took a couple of days before the sun managed to break through the perpetual gray haze and it shot up to 24 degrees. It only lasted a day, and then we were back to shivering in our unheated rooms, hoping our washing, that had been hanging out for three days, would dry, although this was always going to be unlikely with such drizzle and downpours! Oscillations from teeth-chattering cold to sunburn hot continued for the duration of our stay. We also got to see the biggest raindrops ever. You really had to see them to understand how blogworthy they were!
Tags: craft, food, learning, postcard: China, weather
rayres
aww and you guys are wearing your capes!! *warm fuzzies* eek i hope they’re standing up to the weather!
love the mice! 😀
They are The Best Nova…….we have worn them heaps this past week. Absolutely wonderful. And half the Chinese population on motorbikes wears capes in the same colour so we fit right in!!!
that’s good then 🙂 i was a bit worried since they hadn’t been tested like ones from kathmandu have! umm…. you fit right in?! 😉