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Sunday morning came too early. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed and was cranky until getting to the monastery. Our tour guides are obnoxious in the sense that we (the group) feel rushed through everything. They (our tour guides) are always yelling at us to “Hurry up!” “Come on!” “Let’s go! Let’s go!” I sometimes don’t even get a chance to take a breath before getting yelled at to continue on and I can’t even go to the restroom without being rushed! But so Sunday morning I got yelled at to hurry up, even though half of the group wasn’t even ready yet. :/ Don’t be yelling at me, I’m up, I’m ready.
So breakfast was less than appetizing. Besides that it had rice noodles, I’m not sure of what was in the bowl, I didn’t eat much.
We drove to the monastery, which is the biggest in Yunnan. It was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and has been in the process of being rebuilt since the mid-1990s. It was really pretty and it was cool to listen to our tour guide talk about Tibetan Buddhism. (Which is slightly different than Chinese Buddhism) This was the first time that we really got to look at everything and take pictures (when appropriate). It is disrespectful to wear hats, sunglasses, or hoods (so basically anything) on your head. No skin showing, so I had to wear jeans and a jacket, which was fine because it was so cold!
After that we went to lunch.. which was pretty awesome! The food was really good J I really love the food that I had in Shangri-La.
Around noon we hit the van for a ride that I’m not soon to forget..
The ride was chill for the first 2 or so hours. We stopped after the 1
st hour because the van driver needed to add fluid for the brakes. We stopped an hour later to fill up the tank. About 3 hours into it we stop again to find out that there is water in the engine because the fuel was too watery. Well there is a sensor that shuts down the van if there is too much fluid that isn’t fuel detected. The van driver had installed a switch to fool the sensor for at least a period of time so that the van could continue to run. It was scary because a few times the van stalled and we thought that we would be stuck on the side of the mountain. (Remember how there are no highways to Shangri-La?) If that wasn’t scary enough, we stopped around a half an hour later in traffic. A tanker had flipped at 10am and they were still trying to get it out of the way (it was now almost 4). We had heard through the grapevine that the flip was about 6 miles away from where we were stopped. We thought that we’d miss our train meaning that we’d miss our plane to Beijing. D: We were stuck for about an hour before being able to move again. We saw the oil all over the side of the road.
We stopped for dinner around 5:30 at a place where it was pretty gross, I didn’t eat much dinner because there were flies all over the place. Yuck. The toilets were holes in the ground. It’s the worst kind of squatty potty ever. (Special post on squatty potties later).
We did make our train. We thought that it was at 8, but it was really at 9. We arrived at the train station a little after 7. The lights went out at 10. I snuggled up, knowing that I had a long day ahead. It felt like a second before Wu laoshi was yelling that we only had 5 minutes before we needed to get off of the train. We rushed to the airport, a little less of a hurry knowing that we had some time to chill. We were able to sit for 20 minutes before the shuttle to take us to our plane arrived. The plane ride wasn’t too bad. I watched some CCTV about how the solar system formed. I fell asleep for a bit, lunch was served (I was starving because dinner the night before was totally gross and that was at 5pm) and I think that it might have been because I was so hungry, but it wasn’t half bad for plane food. I fell back asleep before waking up a half an hour to lading because the TVs were cut off.
I landed in Beijing at noon, took a hlf an hour drive to my hotel where I am now. About to go out with the group to find some food because we last ate at 10:30 and it’s 3:30 now.
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Dad
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8 Days!
Just 8 more days until we get her back!! We miss you Kristin!