With the sun setting behind the mountains, there isn’t really much to do here in Pingan village in Longsheng county. I decided to eat at my accomodations A Meng House. They have a menu of mostly traditional food. At least it will be different from the smoke meat I keep eating in Hunan province.
The dining area at A Men House is at the ground floor where the entrance was. It was just a simple collection of tables for guests. It does seem that I was not the only guest here since there were also local Chinese guests. They were also dining in A Meng House. I ordered my food and went outside to take photos while they prepare my food.
It was a very peaceful scene staying here on the mountains. Most of the villagers walking on the mountain are already heading back to their homes. There aren’t any streetlights here so it would be best to get back by night. My food eventaully came and proceeded to eat, I ordered one tofu and one chicken dish. I forgot the names of the food unfortunately. But they were obviously freshly made with whatever they have at hand.
The other table of Chinese tourists, noticed me and asked me to join them for dinner. I moved my food over and ate with them. There were two groups of tourists there, one as an elderly Chinese couple while another one was two young female professionals. Both of the groups came from the nearby province of Guangdong 广东 and were only there for a few days.
They were very friendly and were surprised to find out that I was a foreigner. Fortunately, my Chinese was enough to converse with them for a significant amount of time. The elderly couple started to talk to me about things from his travels to politics. I barely kept up with this. There were times that they would converse with each other in Cantonese leaving me with question marks. Later, our host joined us in the conversation and even sang a traditional Zhuang song for us.
It was nice to be able to eat with other people in a foreign land. I’m pleasantly surprised to know they are more than willing to share the table with complete strangers. I would understand this with village folk but these are city folk from one of the most populous cities in the world. After dinner, the elderly couple head back upstairs while I was with the two professionals. At one point they were teaching A Meng how to use Adobe Photoshop. The two girls knowning that I was knowledgable in computers volunteered me to teach him. I was willing to help but the software was in Chinese, I didn’t know what the menu items meant. Fortunately, they were both designers and know Photoshop so they helped A Meng instead.
A Meng was a friendly guy and talked to us about a lot of stuff. It seemed that the girls already did their hike that morning and were leaving the next day to their next destination on their way back to Guangdong. A Meng it seems has a friend in their destination and recommended him for help in hiking and accomodations. I still have to go hiking the next day but the girls found out that I will be going to the same place as them ask me to follow them there. They left their number with me so I can contact them when I get there. Cool.
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