We began Wednesday morning with breakfast at the rooftop buffet. They have a wonderful mixture of English and Chinese foods and we come away with quite an eclectic mixture. We both normally get fried rice and I sometimes get a steamed vegetable or noodle dish. There is also a chef who will prepare omelets or fried eggs to order. OR, you can go truly local and ask for a bowl of noodle soup and you add vegies and spices to suit your palate.
We enjoy trying different things and this morning I found a dish called “Char Kway Teow”. It was a noodle dish, with bits of an unknown meat and was delicious…..found out later that it was Pork.
These are their “raisins”…..
….actually Dried Apricots.
The most interesting dish of the day was “Fried Pumpkin Bread” and how could I not try it when it looked like this…..
It was fairly bland with not much flavor but they get full marks for presentation!!!
My final thought as I was eating was….”is it a sacrilege to use bacon to push Fried Rice onto a fork??????”
We spent all of the morning up in the “Crystal Club” room. We paid extra to be on the “club” level and it provides use of the lounge room which gives us a great place to work at our computer. Michael got a lot of writing done on his paper and I spent most of the time thinking about and planning the house move. It has been really nice to have this relaxed time as it has given me time to research various things that we will need to purchase. I think that I have found some good ideas and prices on everything!!!
In the afternoon, Michael needed to visit the Kunming Institute of Zoology so we decided to enjoy the 1.5 mile walk. Unfortunately, we had only gone about 3 blocks when there was a huge crack of thunder, followed by sprinkles of rain. We did a quick change of plans and hailed a taxi. This was a fortunate choice as it was pouring when we finally arrived at KIZ.
While in KIZ, we had to look across the compound to see our sixth floor apartment from last year. We gleefully rejoiced that we were staying in a nice hotel this year!!!
Our attempt to catch a taxi for the trip back was unsuccessful, and it wasn’t raining much, so we decided to go ahead and walk. Walking was tricky because the sidewalk was very slippery so we had to walk carefully and slowly. Each sidewalk has a special row of textured tiles that are for blind people to be able to “feel” their way along the street. Amazingly these tiles were the most slippery!!!
We arrived at one of the corners where we needed to make a right hand turn, but found that the entire sidewalk was torn up and that we were blocked from going that way. We skirted the rubble piles and continued down the street, constantly checking our map to see where we could turn next. We finally made it to the edge of the lake and were able to see our hotel on the other side so we knew that we had made it!!!
Much of this walk was done in the middle of the street as the sidewalks were either blocked off by blue walls or were filled with rubble. It certainly made for an interesting walk and just a little bit of swearing!!!!
Speaking of swearing, Michael has a love/hate with this particular machine….
On most days, he can walk up, put a cup under the spigot, push the button and out will flow a double Espresso. However, one morning it would not work and the young attendant had no idea how to fix it. She just started pushing buttons and muttering under her breath. At one point she pushed the “steam” button and then couldn’t figure out how to get it to turn off again. Finally, Michael reached around her and pushed the button a second time to stop the steam. I pointed out that it said “drawer full” and motioned that she needed to empty the drip tray. Once she did that it worked fine. Also, the attendants don’t understand about the “espresso” button and keep trying to reach over and push the “coffee” button.
To end our day, we walked to Salvador’s for dinner and returned to the hotel to find this out front…..
The bride and groom were handing out candies.…although the groom looks more like he is texting!!!