The fortunate traveller

Last night I experienced one of those nights that has driven me to spend close to 2 years of my life in traveling to more than 20 countries.

I am in a pretty city right now in the South West of China called Yangshuo, I would describe it as a cross between and old Chinese village and Alps village, if I'd ever been to the Alps. It is fairly quiet, with few cars and surrounded by jagged Karst mountains. They are the type of mountains that raise suddenly from the ground like a a dragon's tooth. They are very dissimilar to Canadian mountains in that ours tend to roll and be gradual inclines these are violent and sudden protrusions.

Anyways, the fun part.

Last night I bought a ticket to go see a very famous show on the river here. However, I am one of very few westerners in town and I accepted going into that I'd be doing a lot of guessing about where I was supposed to be and what not. However, in the van load of people that I was with was a man from Shenzhen who spoke quite good English. He translated the relevant instructions that I needed to know and introduced me to his wife and two of her co-workers who spoke a smidgeon of English. We did the usual chatting about China, where I was from, how cold Canada must be right now and what not.

However, after the show he invited me to come to a local restaraunt with them to try Beer Fish, a local spicy specialty of fish cooked in...suprisingly...beer. It was pretty good and we had a few other meats with it that I couldn't recognize the size, shape or name of in Chinese. But it was fun to dine with people and I invited them to a local bar called Havana (naturally, why wouldn't there be a tiny Cuban bar in this village?) that had great Mojitos and decent cigars. We played pool and chatted in a rather limited fashion until well past one.

It was a really fun night that all turned on saying yes to a bloke who randomly spoke English in my van on my way to a beautiful show on the Li River.