Quick wrap up of week before Yangshuo

The other week I was trying to plan Kurt's visit to China. He is coming for 12 days, woohoo, so we are going to go to Kunming, Shanghai and then back to Beijing! I used this website to buy our flights. First off, they have flights online for around $95 one way which I guess is good. I was pretty psyched and tried to book it but the website said it was sold out. Why put a flight online that is sold out? I found another flight that was more expensive and booked it. A woman called me to confirm it and I told her I needed to book another flight. She said she could do it so we started talking and she found a flight for around $95 again. I was super excited until she said that it wasn't really available and here comes my favorite line: "Maybe they put a cheaper price to attract you, but it is not the real price." What the hell?!?! This has become a trend here when communicating with Chinese people. When talking to someone about a service you normally expect yes or no definitive answers. Here you get a lot of "I think maybes" and those drive me nuts. I don't want an "I think maybe" when I am asking if I have a seat on a plane.

The other week I also went to a concert at the Bookworm (a cool cafe/library) with Empi and Mikael. It was really interesting. The group consisted of two Mongolians and one Kazak. One of the Mongolians did amazing throat singing. He was pretty funny too. This may be one of those "you had to be there" moments, but I will tell you anyway. None of the members in the band seemed to speak English as everytime they spoke it was in Chinese, to an English speaking audience, so it was translated. Throughout the concert they would tell little stories about each song and why it was important. The last song was a catchy throat singing song and out of nowhere during the chorus, the main guy says, "Everybody!" So everyone starts singing the chorus. Mind you people spend years training their voices to sound like this, so here is this guy who is amazing at throat singing telling all of us foreigners to sing along. It was pretty funny, guess you had to be there.