Day 71: Xining (西宁) – August 28

 With a day to spare in a big city, we made the most of our day by…. watching three movies! And being Tuesday, it was half price!! Popcorn though, was ridiculously priced so we ended up buying cherry tomatoes from the market as our snack =)

We watched 消失的子弹, 边境风云 and Batman!! We’ve been spoiled these couple months with the Chinese movies we’ve watched. Think these movies have been much better in terms of artistic direction and plot as well. Highly recommend any of the movies, especially 消失的子弹!! Watching three movies in a day was rather tiring, a bit even more tiring than hiking =)

In between movies, we headed to a local Dico’s (Chinese KFC?) for some afternoon-tea promotion they had, where you get two drumsticks for $8.5RMB!!! After lining up for about 15minutes, we got to the counter and asked for our long-awaited deal, I even had $17 ready to get us four drumsticks! This is how it fell through

Me: “Can I get that afternoon tea special?”
*hands over $17*
Manager: “What’s the secret code?”
Me: “W T F?”
Manager: “You need a special code to get the discount. Don’t you know this?
Me: “What secret code? Can you just tell us?”
Manager: “No.”

…. WE WOULD NOT LEAVE EMPTY HANDED! So we regrouped, baidu’d some forums and got the secret code!!! The forum said, you are supposed to say the code, and the server will respond you with a even more stupid phrase: “好吃就是卡吱卡吱”. Feeling a little bit retarded, I took a swig of my clear liquid from yesterday and lined up again. This time we were served by a rookie server.

Me: “脆皮炸鸡，美味再一次”
Knowing I just said something stupid, it made me felt better knowing they would respond in a even stupider manner, but what I got was totally upsetting…
Server: “Okay, that’s $17RMB please.”

STUPID MANAGER. NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE CODE!!! Anyways…. the drumsticks were possibly one of the best fried chicken we’ve ever had, so it was all worth’d. Don’t know how they do it, but Chinese people know how to fry their chicken!