(Note: sorry for the extremely late posts. Really haven’t had any time to write these up with all the work recently)
Another looong day in Guilin. NYU had plenty planned for us and it was possibly the most fun of all the days in Guilin. After eating breakfast at Cafe China, it was time to grab some bikes and… wait, I mean, get in a car and drive to the Lijiang River. Since I don’t know how to ride a bike, I got to ride in a car along with other people who don’t know or don’t care to ride a bike. We kept stopping to wait for the bikers, which allowed me to take pictures of them riding. When we got to the river, we boarded bamboo rafts in pairs and went on a long and relaxing ride down the river.
Rafting on the Li River
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Like with my Beijing posts, I’ll have brief daily recap for each day of the trip and then have separate posts for anything that requires more detail. (And no, I haven’t forgotten about Beijing. I’ll get to those eventually, but I’ll be drowning in work this week, so those might have to wait.)
Anyways, I had no chance of being late for our 5:30 AM meet-up because I pulled an all-nighter. Tired, but excited, I hopped onto a bus to Hong Qiao airport for our early morning flight to Guilin. At the Guilin airport, we met up with our tour guides for the trip, Jessie and Moy. Luckily, we had some time to rest on the bus during our two hour drive to Yangshuo.
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Just like Beijing last week, this is my pre-departure post for Guilin! Again, I probably won’t have internet access and if I do, I’ll probably only check email. I won’t have my laptop on me, so don’t expect any updates until at least October 3rd, when I return from Chengdu.
Anyways, my overall itinerary for this vacation:
09/25 – 09/29: Guilin
09/29 – 10/03: Chengdu
Talk to you all in a week!
(Also a note. I’ll get the rest of the Beijing stuff up when I get back.)
It’s once again the last day of class for the week and I’m again scurrying to get ready for a trip. This one, however, is much longer. Guilin for five days and then Chengdu for 4 days. That’s three times what Beijing was the week before. I’m excited, but back-to-back weekends with trips is really tiring. And I haven’t even left yet!
Anyways, the day started out the same as usual with Chinese. At noon, we had a health lecture given by Dr. Henry Chung, Associate Vice President of Health at NYU. I honestly expected something really boring, but he was an enthusiastic guy and was pretty funny too. He did, however, kind of scare me from eating some of the stuff at the back gate. All that bacteria…
Anywho, class ended and that meant packing, packing, packing. Funny thing is, it’s 4:44 (what a terrible number) right now as I’m typing this and I’m still not done packing. Darn our small dryer! I have about 45 minutes before I leave for Guilin. I am psyched! Can’t believe I pulled an all-nighter though. I wasn’t even doing homework. At least I got the blog updated again. I can’t imagine the hard time I’ll have updating when I get back…
To think yesterday’s agenda was ambitious. This day’s agenda was even crazier. Not that it had a billion places or anything, but the time we had to wake-up. I think I wake up at 4:30 AM. Why this early? Why the daily flag-raising at Tiananmen Square, of course. Yeah, I’m crazy. And no, it wasn’t really worth it. It was cold, drizzling, and Chinese people have no patience to wait in an orderly line. It’s all push and shove.
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