here are two digital camera videos.

Mom making Pig sounds on concrete pigs in Guilin Mom Pigs Guilin

Our bikeride in Yangshuo… Post about it coming soon Yangshuo

Taking a boat down the Li River is something many tourists do, and it was a very beautiful trip. Our boat left port at 9am so we had to leave the hotel in Guilin by 8:15 in three taxis. The taxi drivers tried to sell us on the idea that the boats wouldn’t take our luggage, and offered to drive it down for us, but it was just a scam. The boat trip itself was about 5 hours long, and by car the trip is only an hour and a half, but from the water the view is magnificent. It rained a little bit on and off while we were on the boat, and when it wasn’t raining we went on the upper deck and took pictures. Mom and I talked to some Japanese businessmen that were just thrilled to talk to Americans. The mountains were very awesome, with parts where sheer rock cliffs came down to the water’s edge, and other parts where there were the fog made the distant mountains up against the close up mountains look like a 3d picture, where you have to use the red and blue glasses to see the image. The boat was a little over 100 feet long I think and had two restrooms, a large diesel engine and a kitchen to cook lunch for everyone on board. The food was not so good on the boat, it was very greasy and I also didn’t feel very well so I only ate the steamed rice. I was surprised that many little boats came up to our large boat with things to sell. They took a large metal hooks and attached it to the tire bumpers on our boat, and tried to sell things to the tourists on our boat. Audrey bought something, I don’t really know what it is, but I’m sure we’ll see a picture of it later. The boat arrived as it was supposed to, about 5 hours later in Yangshuo, and again all the high-pressure sales people came up and tried to sell us postcards and everything else we didn’t want. Time is up for now, we’re leaving for Nanning tomorrow early and I need to go to bed. I’ll write on the trip there about Yangshuo and everything else that has happened.

Ive started to use the correct chinese character for Yuan.  You might see funny text or get a prompt to install foreign language support.  If you see funny text after a number, its for that symbol, which means yuan.   8 yuan = 1 dollar.  If you dont see the character, ive attached it as an image on this post.

1-14-2005 Shanghai has lots of places to go shopping and its one of the more common things to do here. This time we went shopping at an old temple, which had a really nice garden in the middle. It cost about 10元 to get into the garden and it took quite a while to get through it. It was very nice though and very old. It looked like it had been restored and was maybe several hundred years old. There were little buildings through out with large ponds filled with fish. All the buildings had the classic Chinese roofs with the curving up of the corners. Audrey bought some more stuff at a few of the small little shops and we took lots of pictures. I discovered that Elita is quite a good photographer as she took most of the pictures with my camera. Unfortunately I uploaded all the pictures at the same time and they are not all in the right order. Once we were done shopping we took a cab and found this little Japanese restaurant. It turned out to be not that great, but we picked it because it started to rain a little, and we didn’t have our wet weather coats or any umbrellas. Dan ended up ordering two meals because his first one wasn’t very good. We took two cabs home, I went with my mom and Dan, Elita and Audrey went by the mall to pick up Audrey’s new glasses. Mom and Dad went to bed when we got home, and I went out with Dan Elita Gina and Dámaris for Hotpot once again. It was very good once again. We had to pack when we got home for our flight the next day and I didn’t make it to bed until about 3:30am. It was too late to stay up as we planned on meeting at the hotel across the street from Dan’s apartment for breakfast at 8am.

1-15-2006 Today we got up early and had a buffet breakfast with the parents and everyone else staying at the hotel. It was a buffet with just about anything you could want for breakfast, including many different types of Chinese food. After breakfast we went to a museum down town where the most interesting thing was ancient bronze pots, sculptures and instruments. They also had ancient clothes, cloths, and ceramics. The ceramics were also cool but I don’t think they were as old as the bronze. We didn’t have too much time at the museum because we had to catch a flight to Guilin and be at the airport by 2pm.

My head started to get a bit congested on the way to the airport. I didn’t really think much of it until the air pressure on the plane felt wrong. My head felt like it was going to explode for the two and a half hours I was on the plane, and about half way through my ears plugged up, and I couldn’t hear anything. We took a private bus for about 45 minutes into town from the airport and the driver, who didn’t speak any Chinese, must have thought we were crazy because we were playing a song game the whole way there. Someone would pick a theme and we had to think of songs that fit into that theme. The catch was you actually had to sing the song, not just think of its name.

We got all settled into the Sheraton Hotel and then headed for dinner. There was a walking street just around the corner, on the same block as the hotel and we found this nice, brand new restaurant where we had some excellent local Chinese food. It was a long day, and after dinner we used the Internet for a little bit before going to bed. This hotel didn’t have wireless or Ethernet in every room, so they wired DSL through the hotel. If you wanted Internet, like we did, it was 50元 per day for the DSL modem. The Internet seemed faster than it was anywhere else on the trip, but I think that’s because nobody else in the hotel was using it at that time.

1-16-2006 Elita found and hired a private tour guide today with a bus, to go see some of the sights in Guilin. Our first stop was the football hill. At the bottom was a nice little park and garden with a few statues, a model of a little ship and a large bush about 15 feet tall shaped as a peacock. There was a little cave that went under the hill and on the river side it opened up again with nice statues carved into the rock of the hill. There was also a very large arch, but the bottom of the outside part didn’t touch the ground at all. There was just enough room to put your hand under it. The rock was very smooth from people touching it so much. We then hiked up the hill. There were 365 steps up to the top and I ran it all the way up. There were gnats at the top that sort of blocked the view, but it was a very nice view.

Once we were done with the football rock it was onto the caves in Guilin. Our guide explained that many people were saved in the caves when the Japanese came through about a hundred years ago and wiped out the population and destroyed the city. She said the caves could hold about 4000 people, and it was only know about by the locals. The caves remained hidden to the public until about 1970 when the government made it into a tourist attraction. Seeing the caves was very cool because it wasn’t really in the city. We had to drive about 20 minutes on a not-so-great road to get there, yet the tourist sales people were still everywhere trying to sell whatever they could for way too much money by Chinese standards.

We headed to see a silk factory after seeing the caves. The silk factory wasn’t really a factory, but instead a mock factory for tourists to see how the silk is made. There was also a showroom to buy silk quilts and bedspreads. The process was kind of cool, but I’ll let you guys watch the video of it when I get it done instead of writing about it in detail now. Our last stop was the Elephant trunk rock. This rock was very near downtown and was just off the main road. They put up big signs and tall bushes so you couldn’t see it from the street without paying. Our guide said that if you don’t get a picture at this rock, then you have not been to Guilin.

We got foot massages after dinner. They were an hour long and the place was really cool. It cost 100元 per person for a 1-hour session and we all got to sit in these nice chairs in the same room. This place was like a compound; it had many different buildings with separate rooms of different sizes. One of the girls said they could do 150 massages at the same time, but she was happy they weren’t busy so she could rest in between customers. None of the masseuses could speak any English so Dan and Elita did a lot of translating. One comment that Dan’s masseuse said was that “everyone is happy when you [Dan] are around”. Dan is always talking and the Chinese people thing he is the funniest thing in the world. He likes to speak his Chinese and sometimes he slips up because you can say every word with four different accents, and each accent has a completely different meaning. Our massages were great, though for Dan, it was not hard enough. We went shopping for snacks after our massage so we could have some things to eat on the river boat on the way to Yangshuo.