Morning Constitutional

Our last morning in Guilin (Friday, June 15), and we woke up a little early. We had time after breakfast and before we met our group to head for the boat to Yangshuo, so we decided to have our morning constitutional in the park in front of the Bravo Hotel. There’s a small lake in the middle of the park, so we thought we’d walk around the park and see what we could see. The views were lovely.

The girls loved these benches in the shape of pigs. (I don't know if they reside in the park only because this is the year of the pig or if they are permanent residents.)

The park was packed with morning exercisers, most doing exercises we’ve seen before – martial arts with swords, dances with fans or scarves or ribbons, etc. But there was one new one for us – the exercisers did their moves holding a racquet with a ball balanced on it. They would spin about, trying to keep the ball from falling off, and at times they would hit the ball upward and catch it on the racquet. Pretty cool!

The only drawback to all the exercise groups is that each comes equipped with its own tape player blaring out scratchy, tinny tunes. And of course they can't be the same tune. So you walk from one musical selection to the other. I much prefer my parks to be quiet!

We walked along, enjoying the day, and came upon a little slice of Paris and San Francisco:

We were setting a pretty lazy pace (that’s Maya’s natural pace!) because we could see our hotel and knew how close we were to it. We expected to circle the lake and reach the hotel in plenty of time to meet our party. But the sidewalk suddenly dead-ended! It seems it isn’t possible to go all the way around the lake. That meant a mad dash back around the way we came. We reached the lobby ten minutes past our set time, but our guides said no worries, we still had plenty of time to reach the boat. I guess they build in extra time just for silly tourists like us!

Despite the harried finish, we did enjoy our morning constitutional.