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Sunday, July 3, 2011

It's Been a While and it's Late, but...

Hello everyone, sorry it has been so long since I wrote an entry but once again it's late and I can't sleep. I've been really busy, so at least there's a lot to write about. It all started with three great friends coming to visit us in Nanjing, Jacob, Elisabetta, and Carlos. They came and hung out with us in Nanjing for a couple days where we didn't really too much because we were just about to travel together to the cities of Chengdu, Chongqing, and Guilin. Chengdu is famous for it's spicy food and all of the Pandas that live there! Guilin is surrounded by some of the most beautiful mountains. The floating mountains in Avatar are based on them. So we flew together to Chengdu and we went to our hostel, and it is by far the coolest place to stay ever. It had palm trees and ponds and little hidden areas to sit and talk. There was a pool table, a bar, a restaurant, and on the first night we were there, they had a barbecue. For a few hundred Chinese dollars, they could take you to Tibet for a few days, how cool is that? The next day we took a bus to the Panda preserve, and it was pretty cool. It wasn't the most fun because it was really hot and we had to get up really early and hadn't eaten. While we were there though, one man was delivering a truck bed's worth of bamboo and someone got a hold of a couple stalks of it. Some of the hungrier people (including yours truly) tried the bamboo, and it wasn't that great. Needless to say, when we came back, we all went and got food, and I went to the hostel restaurant with some new people.
     The next day, we took a bus for a couple hours to a neighboring city. We then took a ferry to go see the giant stone Buddha that was carved into the mountain. It was soooooooooooo cool to see it, it's amazing to think that that  stone Buddha is over 1000 years old, it's amazing that it was completed without power tools at all. The next day we all took a train to guilin, but it was a long train, and we had a layover in chongqing. We took a bullet train to chongqing which went around 120 mph. While we were there, we explored the city a little bit before we had to take our 20 hour train ride. That doesn't sound like it'd be too bad because you would assume you'd have a bed. Well we didn't because we waited too long to buy our tickets, so we had to take a hard seat. It's no more than a plastic booth that you had to cram 3 people on per side, which would be no problem if you were Chinese, but we weren't so some of us didn't have a place to sit to sleep, a.k.a. me. That was fine, I have trouble sleeping in moving vehicles anyways. I ended up finding a "nice" place to sleep... on the dirty floor which probably hadn't been mopped in my lifetime. The train was so old it didn't even have A/C, so you had to open the windows for fresh air. That was fine and all, but it was a real pain at 2 in the morning when you passed another train, it was so loud that almost all of the windows were shut, so there was no fresh air. Also it was hard to get good food at a reasonable price on the train. The food trolley would gouge you on the prices and the "fresh" fruit sometimes had bugs in them, but hey that's China. To avoid this, I bought a few of the Chinese version of ramen noodles, because all trains have boiling water to make them. Little did I realize that this train was so old that it had a coal powered fire to boil the water. it was definitely one of the strangest and most fun experiences of my life! When we finally arrived to guilin, we crashed in our hostel room and just slept.
     The next day Molly, Elisabetta, Jacob, Carlos and I met up with a few of Jacob's friends in a neighboring city called Yangshuo. Yangshuo is the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It's this little tiny city nestled in the middle of these beautiful mountains. So we met up at this Italian place on the city's western street (It literally translates to west street) and we finally had some Italian food, and it was soooo good (mostly because it's so hard to find in China). We then walked around and we saw this place to rent electric mopeds, so of course we did. We drove em all the way to the "moon hill" which is this mountain that has a giant hole in the center so at a certain time, you can see the moon in it.We climbed it all the way to the top; you are only supposed to go into the hole, but they have a path that says "don't enter, dangerous." So we did what any person would, and we went in anyway to go to the top. It was pretty dangerous, but the risksooo good! We all started acting silly and coming up with creative ways to jump off or push others off. The current was strong though, so we eventually had to stop. We then went and returned our mopeds and went and walked West Street until we found a good restaurant. We had a feast that night because Jacob and Elisabetta had to leave that night to go home. After dinner, we took them to the bus station and said our good byes. Watching them leave was the only thing that tarnished our perfect day together. We then rented a hostel there that night so we could spend more time there and we watched a few movies and talked about our departed friends.
     The next day, Carlos, Sam, Molly and I had breakfast on the roof of the hostel and then rented the mopeds again to explore Yangshuo. Just outside of the little city was a super urban area and we immediately began exploring. We found signs for this place called the giggling tree. We weren't sure what it was, but we had time to kill so we went and followed the signs.  Just before we got to the giggling tree hostel, it started pouring down rain, I mean like a giant thunder storm, so we got to drive in the rain, and it was great! We got lunch at the hostel and let the rain die away. We went back and explored more, but both Sam and my moped's batteries died. Luckily a woman saw us pushing them and called a towing service, which was two guys who rode different mopeds and attached a rope from theirs to ours. We then gathered our belongings and went to our hostel in guilin for the night, where I taught Molly how to play pool.
     The following day we took a taxi to the airport at like 5 am to catch our flight back home. Shortly after our return, our friends from France, Sanaa and Nora had to go home. A week later, our German/Mexican friend Josh went home too.
     Since then I've been studying and trying to get better at Chinese. This past week we had our final exams/projects. I love how they waited until one week to give us all of the work for the 5 month trip. We had three tests, one of which was a surprise final, I kid you not, and two PowerPoint presentations to do. Almost all of that is done and now I have the next two weeks off. I was so tired after that week of trying to study everything and make PowerPoint, that I actually slept all day Saturday, except for when I got up at noon to use the bathroom and at 6:30 to eat dinner, otherwise I was out or watching movies in a half dazed state, but it was fun.

Sorry it took so long to write this one! Feel free to drop me a line anytime at treyman76@gmail.com or on facebook!

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