The day of the tour and I will say, it was… interesting. We waited outside for the bus to pick us up. It felt strange having the bus come to us instead of us going to the bus, but I’m not complaining. The first thing the tour lady noticed when we boarded was that were foreigners. After the rest of the tour group was picked up, she began to talk. Actually, talk isn’t a good word to describe it. More like she was reciting a speech or something. She kept talking and talking and talking nonstop. I couldn’t understand a word of it, so I thought she was talking about stuff relevant to the places we were going to see. It was later brought to my attention that she was talking about herself and her son! Really now? I didn’t get to sleep because she was so self-centered?

Luckily, she stopped at the rest stop, but then started again when we got back on the bus. Ugh. Not only did she not stop talking, she kept bugging Jessie (the only Mandarin speaker in our group) when we refused to pay extra for stuff we didn’t want to see. She insisted and we resisted. She got pretty annoyed at us and continued to make our lives a living hell for the rest of the day.

It’s a good thing she didn’t go with us to Leshan because that would have driven me insane. Leshan is home to the biggest sitting Buddha in the world, which sounded quite impressive. Unfortunately, we had to wait on a really long line and climb done steep steps and then up again when we were done seeing the Buddha. The giant Buddha was HUGE. Its foot was already bigger than me! I didn’t really enjoy it though. I was burning from the sun and exhausted from the climb and dealing with the tour lady. It didn’t help that we waited at the bus the rest of the tour group for an hour. There was nowhere to sit so we just stood around.

Giant is an understatement...

Big Foot

The best part of the day must have come when we were at this place we didn’t pay for. That allowed us to sit around outside the place. I lied down on the ledge of this walkway to relax my achy back. To my surprised, the pain went away completely.

We had a pretty long ride to our next destination, Emeishan, where the ticket office refused to sell us student discounted tickets because we were temporary students and American. I was pretty angry, but couldn’t do anything about it, even though their ticket policy doesn’t mention anything about being a temporary student. Student is a student is a student, I say…

We finally got to say farewell to the tour lady when we reached the hotel. It was pretty funny during dinner, since the kids on the tour had a lot of fun eating with us and hearing us speak English. They were nice kids. One of them even said she wanted to beat up the tour lady! Unfortunately, the hotel wasn’t as nice as it first looked. None of us showered because the shower looked disgusting and the hotel had bugs everywhere. Not a pleasant place to stay.

Random photos of the day:

Macro fun

Macro fun with Schrodinger's cat