Guilin

on Sunday evening the 18th we officially arrived in Guilin via a bus from longsheng. We stayed at the Park Hotel, which was 4 star Chinese rated and complete with moldy shower walls! We stated there b/c when we landed in Guilin, I went to the tourism counter to ask a question. She started asking if we had hotel reservations and what our plans were. I knew what she was thinking, but we did need hotels for 2 nights. The hotel was fine, but its bed definitely challenged our tolerance for hard beds. We are pretty sure it was just a boxspring. We initially went to the hotel before heading up to Longsheng on Saturday the 17th to drop our bags off and quickly needed to get a cab to the bus station/ tiny little alley where too many buses try to go. We told the cabbie where we needed to go and she (oddly the majority of cabbies we saw here were women) immediately tried to sell us tickets to local tourist attractions. She tried to impress upon her that we were running late and she needed to just drive. She again tried selling us stuff, to which Joe replied and Audrey repeated "bu yong xiexie."(no thank you I do not want any) she then ran out of the car and into the hotel! We assumed she was asking inside where we were trying to go to see if she could drive us instead of taking a bus. I chased her down and joe pretty much yelled at her to drive. She did and we made our bus. We returned to Guilin on Sunday with just enough time to shower and eat dinner at the hotel. We ended up stating most of the day Mondaythe 19th in Guilin due to a delayed flight to Chengdu. We walked around town and found the people to be nice, but didn't really care for the town. It did have a nice walkway along the river and we found a nice park complete with caves, a zoo, wild monkeys wandering around and cool karst rock formations. We figured out that cabbies get some sort of kickback by bringing people to tourist destinations, which explains the cabbie the previous day. Guilin was not really a place we would go back to, but to Li River cruise was nice.