A trip to China - Day 8 - A new day, a new adventure, visiting another palace and gardens

The Lingering Garden

These gardens are very tightly put together and are interspersed with buildings that you can go in and look at as distinct from just looking in from the outside.

There are lots of paths that wind around interspersed with rocks which may or may not be sculpted, and equally interspersed with trees, bushes, and small plants.  In the middle is a lake which usually has lotus plants in bloom, but they are not in season.



The gardens were built around a small lake that was filled with fish of all sizes and colours

 



The buildings were also a contrast for those built for the men


     
and those for the women



In the middle of the garden was a significant rock pillar



surrounded by certain areas of the garden that had smaller rock formations


 


At the end of the garden is a large collection of bonsai trees, some of which are quite exquisite.





After this, we are off to the next hotel, via a truck stop.


The truck stop

These are not the same as ours, except it's a service station.  There is a building but it has a few 'fast food' shops selling either meat or dumplings or duck, with a convenience store.

We're here for a happy house stop as it's several hours drive to the hotel.


The Pujing Garden hotel 

Like all the hotels before, from the outside it looks like a million dollars, then you step inside and you get the immediate feeling that it has what I would call old-world opulence that's just a little past its use-by date.

The lifts, from the outside. belied the fact that inside they've seen better days and the management have realised that more elevators were needed to handle six or seven buses arriving at once, so the staff elevator has been included.

The rooms when the hotel was first built would have been the height of luxury.  Now they have a sort of seedy feel about them, but the bathroom looks clean, and it's best to look further than that.

Showers are mouldy in places, doors are broken, and do not have adequate seals, and invariably leak either into the rest of the bathroom or into the main room under the carpet leaving an ugly stain.

Other than that, there's not a lot to complain about.  It is a cheap holiday after all, and the truth is you get what you pay for.


Dinner

We chance our arm in going to the hotel restaurant.  It's probably one of the few places you could trust to eat.

There are those, too, you wouldn't.

This one we were suffering from an extreme lack of understanding, ie no one could understand English, and the waitress looked at us with no comprehension, so it was back to the lady at the front door who could passably speak English to translate.

Steak in that restaurant is labelled 'half-cooked' for medium-rare, 'hardly cooked' for rare and 'completely cooked' for well done.  It comes with a fried egg, tomatoes, and roasted rice on a bed of onions.  There was also a bowl is what appeared to be cream of corn soup that was to die for.
Surprisingly, the food is absolutely delicious.

Four very satisfied customers.