Labour day is like anyday in Shaxi

2 buses and a minibus later and we got to the "off the beaten track" village of Shaxi we're staying at until Monday. We're here to hide out because this weekend is the BIG nationwide chinese labour day holiday, when ALL chinese people go on holiday to other parts of china, and it gets crazy apparently, with no accomodation or space on transport because there are so so many of them... There's really not all that much to do here, which is great because it gives us an excuse to do nothing. We're kept more than busy however with just trying to communicate...

To organise a room when we arrived took us half an hour of gesturing and writing and looking up words in our guide book... and then for lunch we bought a packet of some noodle stuff with all this wierd looking gelatinous stuff in it that we were both too scared to eat...it looked like congealed liver juice or something, we later found out its bean jelly! Not sure if this is that much better though!

And to negotiate to have dinner at our guesthouse was also a real challenge, we had to go into the kitchen and then point to all the veggies we wanted (and shake our heads at the unidentified meat product we didnt want) and then try find the word for 'stir fried' in the guidebook which of course was missing... We managed to ask the price for dinner, which seemed expensive for a simple fried veggies and rice dish. The fact that we'd had a bit of a communication gap became apparent when our dinner was served...all 5 plates of it, plus a huge bowl of rice... Each of the vegetables we'd nodded 'yes' to had been cut up and dressed, the whole of each of those vegetables... there was enough for 4 people. It was a long dinner and we could hardly move afterwards!

On friday we went to the weekly market in Shaxi and bought breakfast which included baba bread (a round pizza dough with chives, fried), and watched all the local people from surrounding villages in their traditional colourful outfits, all carrying 'shopping baskets' on their backs...it was one of those 'wow we're in china' moments.

Things certainly work strangely here, on friday afternoon the guy who runs our guesthouse came to us to ask if we wouldn't mind him moving us to another guesthouse 4km's down the road, just for the night, as he'd made a mistake and needed our room for a large group of people that were arriving that night. Wanting to help the guy out, and telling ourselves we shouldn't be too grumpy as it really made no difference to us, we agreed, and the guy who runs the second guesthouse arrived 30 mins later, drove us to his place, which was out of the village. Here we had a great time drinking green tea (loving the stuff!), learnt to play a chinese '5 in a row' sort of game, had a delicious dinner (huge again, and including some scary looking worm-like objects, which were actually caramelised roots, and were really yummy) and watched a local music show... (which sounded like steven fulfilling his drummer ambitions and banging around on some pots in the kitchen, and a cat howling - if it could - simultaneously) which was actually pretty cool to watch! We were fetched again this morning and we're back at our first guesthouse now...no problems!

It's overcast and drizzly today...so we've made the most of it by blogging and skyping all day, and doing some laundry...which judging by the colour of the water, was long overdue.

Shaxi is the perfect place to be this weekend, as it feels just as quiet as it (surely) must be any other day.

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