Haikou – Day 4

Not a whole lot new to report as the days are pretty similar here.  We spent most of the day in town today wandering around the old part of the city, sampling street food here and there (staying away from the more adventurous chicken hearts on a skewer, blood cake, and intestines).  We have mostly given up on finding the things we hoped to here and will try instead to find them in Hong Kong, although the prices will assuredly be higher there.  We did find a massage place (there seem to be far fewer here than in Guilin) and for the equivalent of $3.75 spent an hour watching Chinese television and getting rubbed down.

The part of town we ended up in for dinner was a street full of different kinds of restaurants, Chinese of course, but also Korean, Japanese and so on.  Before they open for business, they have big meeting out front with all the staff where they play music and do some exercises.  I have taken some pictures so that I can evaluate further such a policy for PDA Verticals.

Being in China, we figured it was still appropriate to go with a Chinese restaurant. Here, none of the menus are in English so you pretty much have to do the best you can choosing from pictures.  We picked the place that seemed the busiest and pointed to a bunch of things that looked safe (the whole carp head seemed to be the most popular dish, but not being in the mood for fish brains, we took a pass).  Of the dishes, we’re about 90% sure one was chicken, 50% sure one was pork, and 50% sure one was beef. It all tasted good and we convinced ourselves we knew what it was so all was well.  I think for my next trip though I am going to print up a laminated card with pictures of different animals on it so just to be sure, when we point at something on the menu we can also point at the animal we think it is made from and see if everyone agrees.

It is coming up on May Day here so the hotel seems to be getting a little busier. We actually have people in our wing now.