As usual, my brain is overflowing with news from the the last week and I can feel the important little details evaporating with each passing day. I really owe Guilin a solid dedicated post, which I hope to put up with pictures in the near future; here’s the interim recap:
Visited my old China home town of Yantai on business last week. A lot has changed. For one thing the new boardwalk is complete and quite impressive.
After a few weeks of China experiences, David is off to Thailand for the continuation of his summer escapades. A great time, though I wish I’d been able to give him more than just evenings and weekends. Check out his blog for the inside story.
Fortunately, he didn’t depart before we managed to fit in a few adventures in the Southern province of Guilin. Lou, David and I hopped a Friday flight south and spent a weekend of squelching fun amidst the gorgeous karst peaks of backpacker haven Yangshuo. 100% of our time there was sopping wet thanks to Monsoon Bilis, but the damp only added to the fun (that’s right memories, I’m shaping you already). Highlights include: floating down river on an inner tube and finding ourselves two hours past the intended destination (a big thank you to our boat-full of Taiwanese saviours); cycling along (though it felt more like “in”) the Yulong river, getting completely lost (“so many old women with cows can’t be wrong”), and eventually making it to the Buddha Water Caves; and Guilin soup noodles. Anti-highlights: Yangshuo’s famed banana pancakes and the over-hyped village of Xingping.
We arrived back to Shanghai on Monday night and it’s essentially hard to believe Thursday has already rolled around.
Couscous at O&K’s (with visiting friends Martin and Anna) on Tuesday followed by Superman Returns. We’re still trying to figure out which controversial scenes the censors felt in need of cutting (we counted about 8 visually jagged and aurally jarring clips in the middle of the film).
Last night was Scotto’s 30th birthday party: a Punjabi stuffed, danc-arific time.
Will try to put up Guilin pics soon.
P.S. The tech savvy will know, but this blog is syndicated on RSS (see also the new link in the upper left corner). That basically means you can add my blog as an intelligent “bookmark” that will display the headings of my new posts, or you can have the posts appear on your home page (such as, My Yahoo, My AOL or Google IG) like news articles (only, updated less frequently).
