CHINA!

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Right now, i am on the edge of something that i cannot mention, and yet, i am forced to keep you bored and informed, so i will tell you. My life is so tough sometimes. boohoo. before i get to the boring though, i will tell you quickly about what i have been up to since i last wrote.

I last wrote as i arrived in Xi'an. As I'm sure you guessed, we saw the Terracotta people, and Amanda was about as impressed as I am on the constant updates she gives me about her grocery shopping (which is not at all in case my analogies are as bad as ben's). And since it was my second time, it was sort of fun playing the tour guide, but that got old fast. Pretty amazing that i can say i saw them twice though. Since we had gone the weeks before pretty hard with the whole tourist thing through all that other stuff, we decided to slow it down a bit and spend a week in Xi'an. We walked through all of the Markets, found some great hole in the walls for dinner and noodles (some so spicy i couldn't even finish them), and spent a lot of time at the hostel meeting all sorts of funny looking people. Those highlights include a lady named Amy from NZ, a guy and girl combo from the States somewhere named mike and lou, two boys from Isle of Man (paul and danny, and a kid from Manchester (alex). I got to learn mahjong from the amricans (which we are now addicted to), and learned chinese chess from the Isle of Man danny, and did a lot of playing these games, and relaxing and reading my book. We did manage to go for a bike ride around the city walls which took about 1.25 hours, and i think was more exercise than i have ever done in my life. So much fun though. We had rented a tandem bike, and rocked that stuff. So awesome. Remind me to do exercise on a less hot day though. So sweaty afterwards (man, I was hot! I think i had three people ask for my phone number after that... swarms)

From there, we traveled 18hour by train to Chengdu, where we are now. We saw the Pandas (they are so cute! we wanted a pic with them, but it cost an arm and a leg, so i saved my money and spent it on Peanut butter instead :>). The next day after that, we toke a van ride 2.5 hours away with four other girls (one from Australia, one from the US, and two from denmark) and saw the Biggest Seated Buddha in the world. It was cool, and took about 20min to see it from the speed boat we hired. That was the good news. The bad news was that the driver had given us 4hours to do it. So we all went to lunch and sat and talked and laughed for the rest of the time. So much fun. I really loved it. The next day, the Aussie, the american, and us went to a vegetarian restaurant in the temple around the corner from us, and sat and talked some more. The Danes had left of a horse treck or something like that. Yesterday us and the American went to the peoples park where there was apparently some sort of dance showdown, and everyone was doing a choreographed dance together. It was awesome. I felt like i was in the middle of a Michael Jackson video, but with less zombies. We were promptly caught in a rain storm for half and hour, and waited at a nice tea house for it to pass.

Today is going to be a slow day (hence the boring-ness), we're gearing up for the train ride that we have to take tonight for 25hours. We're heading down to Guilin and Yangshuo so that we can see some of the south. From there, we head to Shanghai to see the Ladies World Cup Soccer, then down to Hong Kong For our flight to Bangkok. I can't believe how fast this is all going! I've been gone for 5.5weeks now, and i feel like i have just started. Strange. Anyway. I'm off.

Jenn

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