19/6/26 Fri: Up at 7.30am up and ate breakfast at 8.20am. They gave out蜜枣粽because it's端午节too. It was sweet so not bad. At 9.30am, we drove towards赛里木湖, also known as大西洋的最后一滴泪（大西洋暖湿气流长途跋涉后，最后眷顾并凝结成雨雪的地方）. After two hours, we reached the ticketing centre.
Drove a bit further before阿力木let us alight near the jetty as we were supposed to get onto a cruise for a spin around the lake. At noon, we took the half an hour cruise... packed with over 30 people. The lake's beautiful, but I'd prefer the smaller boat on泸沽湖which let us get closer to the waters. Apparently, the weather decides the colour of the lake too.赛里木湖is huge, so even driving around it would take us 2+ hours according to阿力木. We told him to do some drone shots but he could only manage a very basic one at one random spot near the lake. He didn't give us proper instructions so we were kind of blur, but luckily we still had some fun thanks to PY's ideas lol. Also, we saw the rain not far away, so we decided to move towards the next place because it would be some distance away. Left at 3+pm and on the way, we saw people para-gliding etc, so it would have been nice if the agencies told us we could do such activities and we might have left a longer time for this area. Took photos with random statues of foxes and saw many couples taking photoshoots too. 阿力木said they can then come to赛里木湖for free for a lifetime then on... even foreign couples. 阿力木brought us to this restaurant for纸包鱼at 4.30pm. There were no other diners around at such a awkward timing and the room was a bit stuffy. We ordered one柠酸 one双椒flavour and naan (RMB 257) and it was value-for-money. The seabass was very nice and the portion was huge. There was also tofu, beansprout and tang hoon in them too. I personally enjoyed the柠酸one a lot.
After 1.5 hours, we left for 伊犁老城文化旅游区. 阿力木kept saying it's a "kept secret" that he brings his customers to but I doubt so lol. PY wanted to try the 奶疙瘩and man it was sour! From 8 to 9.15pm, we were there and I saw a Muslim mosque which had the exterior of a temple. Bought two labubu for RMB 75 and PY bought a leather bag too. 阿力木wanted us to take the traditional horse ride but he hasn't updated himself with the price for very long and now it's very expensive, so we skipped it in the end. Saw this cute yellow bird outside a shop and it was not afraid of people~ climbed onto Potato's back and FIL's hand haha. I also bought camel and sheep oil (RMB 40) and Fran bought a one-litre桑葚树莓优格 (RMB 28) which I thought was very nice and drank like 1/3 cup. To my horror, I realised it's got green tea in it so I had a hard time falling asleep that night alamak! We wanted to go shopping at六星街next, but could not find parking nearby. It was also crowded, and FIL, Potato and I were also tired, so we drove to索性酒店at 10pm and checked in at 10.30pm. Fran and PY went to六星街themselves after checking in. I was alone in the room while Potato and FIL had already fallen asleep in theirs upstairs. It looked to be one of the cheaper hotels that the agency switched us to last minute without informing me kns. At 12am as I was on my phone on the bed, it blacked out. I panicked a bit and had to go down to the receptionist to inform her but she looked quite bo chup. She got the old security uncle to try to fix while he communicated with the manager, who sleeps in one of the rooms across ours. The security uncle had a hard time fixing it and I was in a tired state mentally and still had to look through all that with him. It took the manager a while to come down finally. After half an hour, the electricity finally came back but I was damn sleepy~ yet couldn't sleep because caffeine sian lol. *I was still awake at 1.30am when PY and Fran got back.*
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