Trip to China

These are all of my pictures that are still on my phone from my trip into Mainland China.

Yangshuo

This is Gemma and I. We came with another friend, Hannah, and ran into some of Hannah's friends, so we followed them to where they were staying. This is shortly after arriving. We road on a sleeper bus, which was a lot more comfortable than sitting on the train that we took back.

This is the show in Yangshuo. That area is part of a river, and the red stuff is some sort of plastic that stretches across the area. The lighted figures men pulling themselves across the water, and they make it look like they are working in a field, moving along a red hill working the ground with their hands. It was brilliant.

Embarking on a trip down the river on a bamboo raft! We went another time, but the next one was a swimming adventure.

This is a street in a group of houses along the river that we stopped at while on our ride down the river.

Same group of houses, different spot.

The Wet Market:

This is the equivalent to a village grocery store in China. This is a really common sight. If you look closely, you can see that they cook the chicken with the heads on.

This is the same market. Some of those bins are snails (on the left side, middle). The bin in the lower left-hand side has live frogs in blue mesh bags.

Bunnies in the middle, pigeons on top, ducks bottom right, and I think those are chickens to the left.

There were a lot of tables with raw meat on them. Pretty gross. Not really sanitary. It was interesting to see all of the pieces of meat out together. It was a bit creepy when I saw literally half of a pig's face just sitting on a table though.

Vegetables! It's hard to eat fresh vegetables, mostly because it's rare for them to be served in China. Likely because, well, these are being sold across from the meat (although they are split into a meat section and a produce section).

We went to the meat market with our cooking class. Don't worry, they had already gotten the meat from somewhere (who knows where though). The food was delicious, and I learned a bit about cooking Chinese food, which hopefully I'll get to apply someday. Note to self: I need a Chinese wok.

Guilin: Our last stop

We went to the Dragon's Back rice patties in Guilin. It was amazing. We hiked up the mountain, and there was a village (which included some tourist hotels), plus a ton of people selling stuff. I bought a new wallet. The view was amazing. Great experience.

That's all folks!