Day 6 - A Slow Day

As busy as the days leading up this were this was a slow day. We decided the previous night that we wanted the hotel for one more night so Dave went down in the morning and paid them. It was tempting to leave and come back just so they'd have to take down our passport information for a third time, but it was too much trouble in the end. We needed a bus ticket to the airport so we headed down to the bus station. The bus was supposed to cost something like 40 a person so was asked the cab driver how much it would cost for him to take us. He said something like 250 so we proceeded to the bus. The bus station informed us that the part that sold tickets to the airport, which was actually half way between Jilin and another town, was closed and we should come back tomorrow. Usually in China you need to reserve things as many days in advanced as possible so that was something of a surprising remark. We decided to get something to eat in the area so we just started to wander down random streets. It had started to snow, the first time I had seen snow in China, so all the streets had a nice white look. We walked around for a while past all the vendors with their mystery meats and live fish in heated buckets.

Lynn had to go to the bathroom so we stopped at a public bathroom. Inside there was a guy whose only job seemed to be cleaning and collecting tolls. I noted that he didn't have the greatest job in the world but Ken pointed out that he was just happy to have an indoor job. And indeed the restroom was clean and he seemed relaxed. The first place we tried to stop into for lunch didn't even have much of a sign, it was basically just a door in the side of a building. I've been to some shady run down looking places in China but none that smelled as bad as that place. It's hard to describe the smell exactly somewhere between a fish market and a butcher shop would be close, but however it smelled it wasn't conducive to eating. The second place we stopped at smelled almost as bad and sent us rushing out into the streets again. We walked to a larger street where we founded a cleaner and decidedly less smelly restaurant. The place seemed to specialize in bowls of rice noodles with meat in them. They had a big list of options including some more expensive group options. We just wanted the less expensive individual things, but no less then five people who worked there tried to steer us to the most expensive thing on the menu.

We turned them all down but it still took a lot of convincing for them to let us order what we wanted from the menu. For all the things you can say about Chinese businesses they are always trying to sell. They weren't about to let the opportunity of four Americans come and go without pushing the highest priced thing on the menu. We finally got what we wanted which was pretty good. After that we went to what was supposed to be the thing to see in Jilin, the ice trees. The book said that a hydroelectric plant a little bit up the river was supposed to somehow cause a fog that left an interesting formation of ice on the trees near the river. They had whole areas of the town decorated with lights to enhance the effect as well. The only problem was that there was no ice. We never saw anything but snow on a single Jilin tree. The hotels all had forecasts of what the trees should look like the only problem was that one hotel disagreed with another. Finally we got tired of looking and went into one hotel to ask what was up. They just said that this had been a bad week to see the trees. We wandered around the hotel for about 45 minutes just looking at the tourist map, and unless we approached the staff they were just happy to let us do our thing. In China it's just too confrontational to ask people why they are milling around the lobby.

We headed over to an underground arcade that was supposed to have some sort of rollerskating rink and wandered around for a while. The whole place was pretty dirty and there were some people sleeping on the floor. Most of the arcade games were pretty old and they had an unusual mix. Ken and Lynn played some sort of shooting game where they had these Bee-Bee guns done up to look like machine guns and you could shoot balloons. The problem was that the guns didn't really puncture many of the balloons. After a while we went back to our hotel. We bought some beer from a small store in the lobby of the hotel. The guy who was running the store had been a little icy to us the past few days but that day he was just delighted. He asked to pose for a picture with us which took an especially long time since he wasn't happy with the first four pictures. Lynn took the pictures since she isn't white and thus interests the Chinese less. After that he gave us a free bag of small clementine like things for our trouble. I don't usually spend my time in America taking pictures with the owners of small stores, and have never gotten anything free at a 7-11. It's going to be a big shock to come back to America and not be a rock star.

Back in the room we watched a TV station that seemed to be showing three minute versions of movies. Eventually a real movie came on, which would have been fine had it not been interrupted by the most annoying commercials ever. Most commercials are annoying and repetitive to begin with, but these went above and beyond. There were less than 12 commercials total but there was a lot of time to fill so the same commercial would just come up over and over again. The most annoying was a five second long commercial involving a little child in a suit reading a catch phrase over and over again into a bank of microphones then sticking one arm up into the air. Lynn noted that if he had a mustache he would look like a baby Hitler. The commercial may have been short but it was never simply run once. They would run it three, five, seven and even nine times in a row. To top it off these blocks would come up more than one in a single commercial break. I took to putting my arm up into the air in time with the little kid which annoyed Lynn to no end.