Blogs from Anhui, China, Asia - page 5

My aunt and uncles picked me up at the Hefei trainstation. My mom's side of the family is from this city so I was very excited to visit with relatives. In fact, there's not much to say about my stay here other than family reunions that involved a lot of yummy food!! I also took advantage of the cheap haircuts and got myself a perm. Several days into my stay, my cousins and I embarked on our own journey to Xi'an! So, onto the next entry...... read more

Guilt! I have had this feeling of guilt since arriving back from the wedding in Australia. Why? For various reasons, all of them trivial. Now before I go on to tell my story, let me start of by saying that guilt is a big thing in my family. We are all comfortably endowed with a guilty conscience about anything and anybody, it is in our genes. Returning to Guangzhou I had made all these plans, I was going to visit such and such places of interest around the city. But instead of doing any of that I just stayed in the hostel and lounged in the common area talking to other travellers, Chinese and Western alike and sipping beers in the evening. For two days I did nothing and then left without ever having done any ... read more

Being the travel junkies we are – we love exploring new places and cultures and China has been a great place to do this. Every free minute we have – we have been out wandering the city or making small trips to nearby cities. This has made our lives a bit crazy at times, but it’s a small price to pay for the experiences we’ve been having. I intro with this because this blog begins a wild 3 week travel /work trip. First stop.. Huangshan. Huangshan (Yellow Mountain in English) is a mountain range in Anhui province that is very well known for its scenery and sharp jutted granite peaks. We had been talking about making the trip for quite some time, however, the trip required a full 3 days and we just hadn’t found the ... read more

The famous scrolls of chinese black and white paintings of high mountains, rocks, trees and sea of clouds come alive in huangshan mountains in the south anhui province. It is a marvelous mountain area, now on the UNESCO World cultural and natural heritage list. there is an old saying well known throughout the country “no need to see any other mountains after huangshan!” Huangshan has spectacular landscape with its four unique scenes: interesting shaped rocks, waterfalls, unique shaped pine trees growing out of rocks, and its sea of clouds. huangshan has it all, the steepness, the grace, the elegance, and so on. There a specific Chinese saying which goes “五岳归来不看山，黄山归来不看岳”. It means basically there are 5 top famous mountains in China. There is no other need to view the other mountains in China if one has ... read more

Hello. This past weekend I went to visit a friend from Colorado China Council who is teaching English in Hefei at the Anhui Medical University. Hefei is like a bigger version of Ma'anshan with no giant steel company. It's the capitol of the Anhui Province and is home to 1.5-1.6 million people. It has a really similar feeling of a big dirty, polluted, bustling city - where old women stiff arm you to get a better placement on the escalator. There are probably twice as many expats and a lot more English speakers than in Ma'anshan (but they just say the same things over and over again - like my Chinese I guess). I managed to get there about 9:30pm on Friday after one of his classes was ending. The bus ride takes about three hours ... read more