Trip to Wuhan

Monday was a holiday known as the "tomb sweeping day". Not having any tombs in China to sweep, I and Fei Fei, along with Fordy and Tex Mex, decided to go to Wuhan for the long weekend. Wuhan is a big city, somewhere around the 4th to 9th largest in China depending on who you ask, with around 9 million people. It's really a tri-cities area, the 3 portions called Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, taking the Wu from the first, and the Han from the other 2, it's now called Wuhan. We saw some interesting sights. As you can see from the pics, the big attraction is the Yellow Crane Tower right in the middle of Wuchang, but the best part I think was the huge snack street area with multitudinous street food options. Wuhan University was also a beautiful place to see (though I didn't include any of those pictures). At night we went to the Wuchang bar area recommended by a taxi driver (unlike our experience in Nanjing, the taxi driver did not take us to a prostitution KTV joint and I think our girlfriends appreciated that). However, that area was more of an American style KTV bar strip with very loud singing going on and seemed to exclusively be patronized (no pun intended) by older married men and their college girlfriends. So after a little while there, we ventured to a pretty cool dance club, though the music was hit and miss.

On the second evening we took the ferry to Hankou (only 2 Yuan a person) to what Fordy was claiming would be a great outdoor restaurant neighborhood with musicians playing for the diners. Well all of that was accurate except he didn't know that the musicians would all be charging at least 30 Yuan per song and that they don't like to take no for an answer, and that there would be dozens of them walking by our table perpetually offering to play a song on some kind of instrument or to sing some songs or both. This would still not be so bad if it wasn't for the other street vendors. Women trying to sell flowers keep coming to the table, putting the flowers in front of our girlfriends and standing there looking sad for at least 10 minutes each and no amount of "bu yao" (don't want!) will make them move. Add to that random people walking around trying to sell cute toys and other people selling Baijo bottles, and this was perhaps the most frustrating dinner ever! But all in all, the trip was a fun experience.