funny pictures from today

While our attachment development report is about the same as yesterday, she's making progress each day, our group had an adventure into the city today. Our agency rep (who is a local Chinese girl) walked us around into the local area. While foreigners were not completely unkown it is definately not a foreign tourist area, nothing was in English, nobody spoke English, and we got lots of stares. We walked through a local outdoor mall where everything seemed very inexpensive to us, but our guide pointed out some things most people couldn't afford (designer shoes for $20), through a wholesale pearl market, and down some local street shops and the avenue for traditional Chinese pharmacy wholesale goods - this included (to name only a few) countless mushroom types, roots of all sorts, coral, starfish, seahorse and other exotic sea creatures (all dried), and various animals. We think these are mostly used for medicinal purposes, but our guide told us the local saying for the region is "they eat anything with four legs but a table, and anything in the air but a plane". Oh yeah, and mix in just a few western items that we saw (Minzi's first McDonald's experience - we're not sure what "meat" they use here either).


Bushels of medicinal items


what medicine is dried seahorse?


The local streets


A touch of western in the modern mall


Next to McD's, what's a city without this place?