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Sept. 29th - Shuhe - Last Day

Today's the last day of the trip. Tomorrow morning we'll return to Dongguan until I go to Shenzhen on the 5th for my flight home on the 6th, my 20+ hours of travelling, yay. At least this time I'll have my family waiting instead of having to find a bus at night to a place that's 3 hours away, a little nicer.

Anyways, it's raining again so we slept in until lunch again. We went back to the family restaurant where there's no menu, you just go to the kitchen and order what you see and tell them how to prepare it. We had this sausage, vegetables and a pork and vegetable dish that was also great.

After lunch, we walked around and eventually got in a taxi to go to a famous park to take a very good picture of Lijiang. The problem was that when we got there, they wanted 30 RMB for a ticket and 80 RMB for a Lijiang construction fee, which I refused the entire trip to pay. They want every tourist to pay 80 RMB for Dayen but I refuse because they have tvs in every bathroom for every toilet and that's just not needed. The place is already incredibly nice and has more things than needed. On top of the price was the fact that it was a crappy day. It was raining on and off and the what's great about the picture is the view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which, we could not see because of the weather, so we decided to just head back to Shuhe.

We walked around a little more and Vivi bought a couple more things for friends. In China, they have a tradition that they have to buy gifts for their siblings, all their friends and all their co-workers. I'm very glad we don't have that in America. We eventually made our way to a nice little place to sit and play cards.

After some intense games of cards, we went to eat dinner at a place we had seen earlier in the day. Their specialty was rice cooked with honey in bamboo. They cut the bamboo and shoved rice mixed with honey down it and put it on a grill to cook in the bamboo. This was quite good; however, the rest of the food at the restaurant was not.

We left there still hungry and made our way back to another Naxi family that we've made a regular visit and got the spicy chicken I learned how to cook, some vegetables and Vivi got her congee. It's like grits but made with whole pieces of rice. It's not very good in my opinion but people in Guangdong love it too much.

After a late second dinner, we headed back to the hostel to pack. I had to find some way to bring back all the stuff I bought so I started tossing out the worn out clothes I have. I've gone through many clothes while here in China because I didn't bring that many considering I've lived here for 8 months and I only brought 2 suitcases. The 2 pairs of tennis shoes were history because I've worn them literally everyday for the last 8 months. As were all the undershirts and socks. I didn't have 1 sock that didn't have a hole in it therefore, they all stay in China to make room.

After we stuffed our suitcases full of everything, we went to sleep. We were meeting our taxi to the airport at 6:40am because we had a 8:40am flight and the airport was a good 45 minute drive out of town so we were waking up at 6am.

Since today nothing special happened, I'm including in it this blog.

Sept. 30th

We woke, got ready and met our taxi and didn't have a hitch in our plans. We made it to the airport an hour before our flight and had plenty of time to get to our gate considering we were at gate 2 of 4. I have to give credit to the security at Lijiang airport. They are the first airport security to catch my money clip that has a little knife on it. I've taken that thing through at least 5 different airports now and nobody has said anything to me about it. Finally, it has been confiscated.

We had a brief layover in Kunming then were on our way to Guangzhou. The flight from Lijiang to Kunming was 40 minutes and it was just 80 minutes from Kunming to Guangzhou so it was like taking off, landing, taking off and landing with very little time in the air.

We caught a bus to Dongguan from the airport at Guangzhou which took about an hour. I fell asleep at some point because I was just exhausted. Now I'm back in Dongguan until my flight back to America.

I'll continue to post pictures on my blog and if I do anything special here, which I'm planning on it, I'll post about that, too.

Oh yes, I've posted possibly my favorite picture ever taken of me. It's my favorite for a couple reasons. First, I look strong in the picture and if I knew it would come out like that, I would've flexed so I looked even stronger and I'm a little disappointed I didn't, but oh well. Second, just the knowledge that the picture was taken at the highest point of the trail after the 28 bends and just as the sun was coming over the peaks of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

Posted by ndwalke on 2008-09-30 09:30:37 | Rating: