Today was yet another day spent without much plans, but turned out to be really fun. Woke up at about 8 today but only left the hostel at 11:30. My roommate and I headed down a back alley at my hostel and we walked along a street filled with locals having their breakfasts and lunches. I had wanted to have a really local brunch and so we stopped at a small eatery opened by a couple of Guangzhou folks. I had century egg porridge while she had plain porridge, and we shared steamed pork buns and dumplings.
After the satisfying brunch, we meandered along the streets towards the walking street along Jingxing street. Along the way there, I came across a Sharetea outlet that sold drinks with a large cup option of 1L sizes! That 1L of taro milk tea (21rmb) lasted me the entire afternoon. The walking street is a long street filled with many stalls selling food, jewelry and knick knacks. In addition, we came across a few shops selling animals as pets. It was rather sad to see so many animals cramped into small cages and even frogs that have been dyed green and pink. You can find ten rabbits housed in a cage barely 40cm by 30cm by 30cm! Despite the cruelty to the animals, the entire street was quite an experience as it is frequented by the Chinese and we did not see any westerners for the hours that we were there.
Along the street was also an old building that housed jewelry shops, painting shops and tribal souvenirs. I found a couple of shops on the top floor that sold hand painted scrolls and cloth posters. These art pieces featured landscape paintings alongside Bible verses written in Chinese calligraphy. They also do custom artwork and customers can request for any particular verses and paintings at any size of their desire. These artwork really look good hung on the walls in offices and at home!
Moving on, we headed to another famous walking street near Zhengyi Street. This particular walking street has a lot of street food stalls that are delicious, but also easily found in certain other states like Guilin. Grilled meats are popular here but beware that the cheap 3 skewers of beef for 10rmb here do not offer real beef but are actually duck meat flavored as beef. However, we also came across a shop further on that sold really good REAL beef skewers at 10rmb each. Note the difference in prices!
Dinner was at a small hole-in-the-wall store near Jingbi Square. After dinner, time for more window shopping along TaoBaoJie where it is a single storey underground mall filled with small clothing and apparel stalls along two parallel walkways and this mall is about 800m long. After some shopping and look-see, it was already about 10pm and we walked back to our hostel. Back in the room, time was spent watching some Chinese and Korean variety shows on YouTube, and teaching my friend some simple English via the English subs on the Korean variety shows.
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