Haikou – Day 2

As expected, a pretty quiet day here today.  The weather is overcast so not much appeal in spending the day at the beach. Instead we decided to go into town in search of some silk carpets, figuring that in a town of a million people there must be a store somewhere that sells them their rugs.  Whether there is no good Chinese word for rug or that they call them something different entirely we don’t really know, but the disconnect is something that would plague us all day, starting with the concierge, who we asked to write on a card we could give to the taxi driver, the address of a place that sold carpets.  After talking this over with his colleague and looking up online a translation, he wrote something down and sent us on our way.

Whatever was written on the card didn’t exactly work out (the street we ended up on was a very sketchy old neighborhood selling mostly plastic housewares and paper lanterns), so we ended up walking around downtown Haikou flashing the same card to anyone we though might be able to point us in the right direction.  Where in most cases we found ourselves sent off to a shop that sold silk shirts, the most entertaining (for me anyways) was standing in a department store with 9 of its employees standing around us trying to figure out what we were looking for and pointing us in different directions.  While it didn’t really generate any good result, it did highlight the friendliness of the people here. It is unfortunate that the number of times you get scammed puts you always on your guard so even when 9 people gather around to try and help you out, in the back of your mind you’re wondering how they are going to try and shake you down.

With no clear idea of where we were going, we acknowledged defeat and headed back to the hotel. Hopefully tomorrow will bring some sun.