part 7

We headed out to lunch and I was famished, hoping for some good Chinese food. Simon, our guide, decided that since Ben and Caleb are both Hubei boys, that he would take us to a restaurant that specialized in food that you would find in Wuhan. I was less than thrilled as the choices were extremely limited in what some of us would be willing to eat. Lots of fungus, kidneys, a huge variety of fish and turtles, eels, snakes and seaweed.



After reading the menu repeatedly we were able to find some dishes, although the shrimp we ordered ended up having all the little legs still attached. Some of us were a bit squeamish about eating it. We asked for regular noodles, but they came tasting like an old shoe. Simon said that was because they were made out of some kind of tofu. I think I politely pushed my food around more than I ate it, but Caleb devoured the fish we ordered, and both our guide and driver ate quite a bit. They brought us some kind of sticky rice balls in a bamboo steamer with what looked like ground pork in the middle. Caleb would not touch them. He made a special point in telling our guide to tell me that he had those everyday in the orphanage, he didn't like them, and he did not want me to cook them for him at home. No worries there, buddy, since I don't even know how they are made.



Thank heavens for the everpresent, ubiquitous watermelon, cantaloupe and cherry tomatoes that have shown up as ending palate cleansers at every nice restaurant we have eaten at while in China.



After lunch we headed back to our hotel where we had the afternoon to just rest and relax. It was so nice to have an afternoon off where we could rest rather than running to yet another tourist site. Our lovely mansion of a hotel that I wrote about here must have had their managers' ears burning when I discussed their dirty carpets because they decided to clean their hallway carpets today. They were shampooing them and then putting down sheets that the guests could walk on. Our rooms were at the end of one hall about 5 doors apart, and you could see by the end of the day which rooms the crazy Americans with 5 kids were staying in. All the other sheets stayed nicely in place, while the ones in the hallway between our two rooms kept getting scattered no matter how many times I stopped to straighten them. Oh well...the carpets underneath didn't really look much cleaner anyway, so I think the shampooing was a lost cause and they just needed to replace their carpets.