Friends make the location

We’ve spent the last week or so in Lijiang which served as a sort of rest stop between big attractions. Yesterday we travelled to Dali, a short train ride away.
I didn’t get much sleep the night before because I was anxious about having to find our hotel. In Lijiang it took us 3~4 hours because our map was wrong and we couldn’t understand the address. Fortunately we met two new friends on the train ride who had cancelled their hotel because it was too far away from the Dali Old Town and decided to stay at the same hotel as us. One of them, Lancy, spoke English well and was able to translate for us.The other, Na, as good at barganing. We found out that our hotel room had two bedrooms plus a living room able to take four people so we tried to get Lancy and Na in but the hotel boss wouldn’t allow it. Instead, they got a normal room at the same rate of a 100 yuan as opposed to the 200.
Afterwards we went for lunch at a restaurant which was really nice because they gave us sunflower seeds before the meal and juk as well as bitter fruits afterwards. We ate fish soup and peking duck and would come back to the restaurant twice more.
Lancy and Na allowed us to do things that we probably would not have done otherwise. The Old Town was really boring because it was full of shops selling modern things. We couldn’t see anything about the town itself that was old so they took us down to the lake where Na was really good at negotiating for us to take a horse driven cart along the side to see a few views. We later had tea and socialize showing each other pictures of our hometowns on our phones. Lancy said that Vancouver look very blue. This is the second time that we’ve used pictures to communicate and forge connections. What was great about meeting Lancy and Na was their immediate kindness. The last thing they did for us was write a paper with translations of things we could do in Dali the next day as they were leaving to return home. The weather wasn’t very good but we were still looking at the two main attractions, the three pagodas and Cengshan mountain.
We had met some other tourist that said the three pagodas tourist area wasn’t worth seeing. We had gone to the entrance with Lancy and Na to take photos but seeing as the weather would be bad on the mountain, followed our plan b to go to the pagodas. It stopped raining in the afternoon and we found the park quite nice under the humid and cloudy sky.
Although my battery showed 2/3 at the beginning of the day and died after 77 pictures right before I saw the best pictures of the day on our way out, we saw some great views and ultimately had a good day. I’m still very mad at the battery indicator but I’ve already raged about that before so I’ll save you the trouble this time (Note that an extra battery cost $70+). I took some with the phone which give an idea of what it’s like. We avoided the crowds as much as we could by walking along the edges of the park rather than the central pathway. We went all the way up to the last building which was a lake view tower and then back down to the pods near the three pagodas. The sun began to shine through the clouds on our way out but my camera battery was dead so all I have is this.