These are the sorts of things you miss when you live in Rural China for five months.
Luzhou doesn’t offer any good coffees or hot chocolates. There’s no Starbucks or equivalent, because the city is quite small. The best coffee we’ve had in Luzhou is from KFC. So when we go to a big city like Chengdu, we visit Starbucks.
We stayed over in Chengdu on Saturday, for one night. The fruit shops in Chengdu are big and have a beautiful variety of fresh fruit available. We went for a walk on Saturday night and found this little shop.
Half a basket of fresh strawberries.
There is a little Muslim restaurant in Luzhou that we visit every now and then. They serve the most delicious lamb and beef dishes. There are only six little tables inside and the place is always full.
This is my favourite dish. All the noodles are handmade there, and they are absolutely delicious. The noodles in this dish look like spaghetti noodles, but they are a little fatter. It comes with roasted chunks of beef and potatoes, as well as big capsicum pieces.
I took the photo when it was still steaming hot, hence the hazy look.
Today we went to the bank to exchange some Chinese Yuan for Australian Dollars, but they didn’t have any. So we exchanged our Yuan for some American Dollars instead. Hello Mr Franklin, nice to meet you!
This is our beautiful little kitten Charles. He is a big part of our life here in China!
We bought Charlie in September 2009, from a teahouse next to the river in downtown Luzhou. It was the best 40 Yuan we’ve spent so far, which is about $6.50 AUD. It’s uncommon to pay 40 Yuan for a kitten here. You can buy them everywhere for about 5 Yuan, or 0.80 AUD.
When we first saw him, he was a tiny little thing, with big eyes. He has one blue eye, one green eye, which made him extra special. He is the friendliest little cat and loves being around people. Usually you don’t ask the owner of a teahouse how much they want for their kitten, but when the kitten is this cute, you do things like that. At first they didn’t want to sell him. They’d bought him as a cat to hunt mice. Although in the end they agreed, and we took him home that afternoon.
He’s about six months old now. He is very inquisitive and investigates everything. Best of all, he loves muffins and cake! Ha.
