Here I met Cody and Jane (whose Chinese names I forgot). They invited me to join them with their guide. They seemed nice enough, so I said yes. I regretted it a tiny bit when we started walking, and we took 30 minutes to walk a very short but somewhat muddy path. But then I thought, what-the-heck, I'll just enjoy whatever they enjoy in this park. It turned out they really enjoyed taking (Cody) and posing for (Jane) photos. So, I also enjoyed taking and posing for endless photo shoots:
After lunch, we split up, since they were going to walk along the Golden Whip Stream, which I had hated so much the previous day. In the afternoon, I did my best to find some trails that were not full of people. This turned out to be quite hard, because, although such trails did seem to exist on the map, nobody knew where they were. In the end, I managed to find a little trail without tourists which led through tea plantations. It was nice, but unfortunately a bit short.
In the evening, I took a bus to the city of Zhangjiajie. For the umpteenth time that weekend, I was surprised by the Chinese way of doing things (previous surprises included the strong conviction that mountains and shouting are somehow two sides of the same coin, that bringing a radio to a nature park is OK, that it makes sense to pay a professional photographer to take your photo with just a lot of mist/clouds in the background, to name just a few...)
This time, the surprise was in my hotel room. It was really quite nice looking - big, nice decorations - and I would guess it was not more than 2 years old.
But now look at the bathroom. It is full of mold and disgusting-looking-ness!
(By the way, that is not shit on the floor by the toilet (I think), it seemed to be just some silicon with dirt on it.)
I am going to investigate this matter further. Does it not bother the average Chinese guest to have a moldy bathroom?
After Zhangjiajie, I stayed in Changsha in the conference hotel for a week. Again, it was a very nice looking hotel (nicer than the one in Zhangjiajie), and this time the bathroom was mold-free. But now, even though a huge vacuum cleaner could be seen in the corridor every day, vacuuming the floor seemed to be more of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I found a large Chinese date (similar to a prune), paper clip, staple, nail (of the kind you use with a hammer, not the human kind fortunately) and piece of a clothing price tag on the floor. And these were just the identifiable things. When I called housekeeping they hung up on me. When I asked at the reception if they could make sure my room was vacuumed, nothing happened. Finally, I succeeded in getting my room vacuumed by asking the maid herself. It was not that much better after that (the price tag piece and nail were still there), but I felt a little better.
Again I wonder. Am I the only one who is bothered by this? Sure, it was the time of the month when I get very picky about cleanliness. But still!
