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Hey! Time for a better update.
Now let's see... where did I leave you? Oh that's right. The last day in Shanghai. It was GREAT! Really. We've just totally fallen in love with the city. I suppose the train at rush hour is the only downside (read Amy's blog for more). The hostel was fab and we were sad to say goodbye. We boarded a 22 hour train to Guilin and off we went.
Fortunately, this time our cabin mates were old people. Not so fortunate, we bought a gigantic suitcase and filled it with stuff (bad idea, I blame Amy and she blames me. and I had to sleep with the suitcase on my bed on the top bunk. Lovely, really. Also, the old man loudly farted all night. He woke Amy and I up. Seriously. We looked at each other and pointed down, then tried not to laugh.
We've shifted the weight around and pulled my backpack out of the suitcase again to make it more manageable. Way better now. I'm trying to stop Amy from buying heavy things :D Tee hee.
The hostel in Guilin was small, but adequate. However the chef was on vacation. We found a really great, hidden restaurant not far away and only locals seemed to be eating there. The food was AWESOME and I even had a peach sundae. We spent a day at the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces and in the local villages of PingAn and Longxi.
Today we stored our heavy luggage (haha! We're smart) at the hostel in Guilin and took the Li River cruise to Yangshou, where we'll be spending the next few nights. The river was beautiful as you'll see in my photos. So were the terraces, for that matter. Really hard to describe in words or even use photos to show how beautiful they are. Hopefully the pictures I upload and the ones Amy provides you (tomorrow she says) will help do the job.
Tomorrow I will be taking a cooking lesson and we'll be watching the Cormorant fishing show. The day after that we'll be biking around town and the outlying villages. Then it's back to Guilin to collect our bags and take a sleeper bus to Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a border city that connects China to Hong Kong... even though they're one country now. They still treat it like leaving China. Ridiculous... tis rhubarb. We have to go there and then walk across the border, then take another train into the city proper. Oh well. That's China for you; nothing here is easy.
I can hardly explain how wonderful this trip has been. It's exhausting but worth every moment! Amy has more of the 'together' photos so you'll see those whenever she gets around to uploading them. Don't worry though, I'll be stealing her photos for when I go home. I want to print pictures of her and I together. I know that I'll be crazy busy when I get home though... I have a hundred things to do to confirm my acceptance for dental hygiene!
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