yangshou

yangshou was the only place in china we went to that wasn't a giant city, and we were really glad we went because it was beautiful and peaceful.

it took me a long time to figure out what those weird looking trees were in the picture above. they're giaaant bamboo. like 40 ft tall bamboo. at the top, it just droops over.
the mountains are made of limestone.
this is the sketchy PVC raft-boat.


guillermo asked to take a picture with this group of people
and then the entire tiny island of people we were docked on wanted to take pictures with us.

time for bed!

fall

taking a little break from the china pictures because i made alex's mom's apple crisp recipe and it was deeeelicious and perfect for a rainy fall day in austin.

kelly came over and we chatted about taiwan. she and her boyfriend are moving there in december to teach at the same school i taught at. i'm so excited for them! they'll have so much fun.
yum.

shanghai.. better city, better life.

oodles of noodles.

we did laundry in every city but this is the only one that had a pole so you could hang it up high.
the only dorm we stayed in with 6 beds. i think there were only 4 of us in there though.
this is haibao, the mascot of the world expo. he was literally everywhere you looked, so we had to give in after a bit.
there are entire stores of matching couples clothing.

i thought this was the expo.. but it's really just a little tiny part of it. the expo itself was in a giant venue off on its own. we didn't make it because we didn't know about it the first night and we didn't have enough time the second day. but people said the lines were looong. actually, one woman told us that you could pay a chinese person to stand in line for you all day and then you come claim your spot once they get to the front 4 hours later.
the skyline at the bund.


goodbye shanghai!

wuhan

we went to wuhan because guillermo's roommate from college, phil, is teaching at a university there which i have since forgotten the name of. phil was very nice and spoke really slowly with easy vocab for the first several hours until guillermo made fun of him so much that he slowly reverted back to normal speech. life as an english teacher in aisa.
we sat in on two lessons on how to play texas hold 'em (which was handy for me because i never learned how to play).
our teammates spoke a whole lot of chinese, but they were fun.
phil said it had rained all month, and the couple of days we were there was no exception.
a little arcade action. i didn't get a picture of the basketball game which is too bad. those shooting practice games are so big in asia. we played prooobably 20 rounds of it.
hot pot. the spicy side was veeery spicy.
we got pretty edible stuff based on me asking for certain kinds of meat in chinese and phil's check random boxes technique.
i would live in asia just for the tea stands.
and that was wuhan.

xi'an and the terracotta warriors

welcome to sunny/clear xi'an. we were in disbelief to see blue sky and actual clouds when we got off the 2 hour bus ride to get to the terracotta warriors outside of the gray city.

same shirt. model pose.

the museum had warriors you could view close up, and the only fully pieced together horse and chariot.

it's amazing to see what they can do as far as restoration goes when you see what they started with
which is this:
and then this:
i can't remember if this was pit 2 or 3. we started with the smaller ones and ended with the giant one
because look how amaaaazing pit one is!

i have to say though, for the great wall being much bigger than i imagined it to be, pit one was a little smaller than i imagined it to be. it seems to be the size of a football field or so. about a third of it is the warriors in their lines.
blonde in china.

the second third of pit 1 is being excavated right now. you can see the black part is ash from when there were fires. and the last third is a whole bunch of dirt like pits 2 and 3 had.

as we were riding to the museum, we saw all of these trees with plastic bags covering each individual fruit. they turned out to be pomegranates. there were bazillions of vendors selling them as you walked from the bus to the museum itself. i bought one and it was deeelicious.

and then this was our hostel which we spent quite a lot of time in due to the rain and wind. luckily at this point i still had the snow bunny jacket.

lonely planet told us about this restaurant with a 3.8 meter long noodle soup which we needed to try. the big bowl is just the noodle. the two smaller bowls are shark fin soup and hot and sour soup. you just put some of the noodle in both and cut it off (very skillfully) with your chopstick. the whole thing was about $4.
on our last day, we went to the muslim quarter which is really the only interesting part of xi'an itself. you see lots of women in headscarves. their specialty is walnut powder, which you can see grinding in these giant medieval looking cauldrons.

snacks in the muslim quarter. those dumplings came with a sichuan sauce and i lost feeling in the roof of my mouth.

our one sketchy taxi ride. guillermo thought we were going to die at any minute.

this is called paomo and it's lamb soup with bread in it. they give you two big circles of bread and you break it up into little pieces yourself. i hadn't seen anyone else eat it at that point, but the chinese break it up into pea sized pieces. it tastes like 'lamby lamb' as guillermo and i termed it, and the bread gets extra gluey. not my fav.

and that was xi'an.