(Title pending. We sincerly apologize for the inconvenience. Please check back again soon.)

Welp, we've made it back to the U.S. and A. Not a ton has happened the last couple of weeks, hence the un-updated blog. We went down to St. George for a long weekend and were able to miss a big snowstorm in northern Utah. We went down with Rach and Dan who stayed for one night before continuing on to Mexico for spring break. We got to climb one day with our friend Joe who's living in Cedar City and going to school at SUU. Then we hung out with our friend Emily for a couple days who was there for a bike race. And then Karen, Teancum, and Dave came down for a couple days and we did a little climbing with them, as well as swimming, eating, barbecuing, and watching movies. An excellent weekend I might say.

We're getting ready to start summer school at UVU (no more UVSC for us!) The semester starts in May, so we've been looking for jobs that are going to match our school schedules. Kat has had a couple of promising interviews, while I haven't heard back from anywhere I've applied. I think a lot of places don't want to hire a nurse who hasn't practiced in a year. Either that, or else all my references are sharing their true feelings about me. :)

Otherwise we've just been spending time hanging out with the fam and trying to decide what we want to do with our lives. Right now it's looking like we'll both graduate next April, so we should be back in Thailand in May. :)

Wah wah!

I've wanted to cry twice in the last 24 hours. Once when I realized that I'd have to pee into a plastic bag on the bus in China. The other, out of pure joy, when I saw a noodle soup stand on the street by our hotel in Bangkok.

As for the story of peeing into a plastic bag on the bus in China, a blog will not do it justice. For real. However, I will be thrilled to tell the story when we're back in the U.S.

We're leaving tonight for Krabi/Tonsai.

Butt why?

Yesterday we were riding our sweet tandem bike down the main road here in Yangshuo, when we were run off the road by a pickup truck with a bunch of people in the back. The best part was the part that almost hit us, was a little girl's bare butt. Her mom was holding her over the side of the truck with her pants down so that the little girl could poop over the side of the truck while it was still moving. Only one of the many, many insanely different things we see everyday here.

Hills Upon Hills, Karsts Upon Karsts...

So here we are in Yangshuo, in the Guangxi province of China.  We've been here for just over a week. It's absolutely gorgeous. The little town is surrounded by karst peaks with the Li river running through it and the Yu Long river nearby. Many of you have probably already seen our pictures on Facebook so I won't post too many here. 

We have been going rock climbing every other day. The climbing here is fantastic and can be easily accessed by bicycle. It's a lot of fun to ride around on a bike anyway because you really get to enjoy the scenery. 

On our days off we have been exploring, hiking, biking and cooking...that's right- 2 days ago we took a Chinese cooking class. :) We learned to cook 5 dishes: cashew nut chicken, eggplant, stuffed vegetables, green vegetables and a local dish called beer fish (you have to get really really drunk before cooking....hahaha...just kidding :) )

Another fun thing about Yangshuo is that it sees a lot of tourists and is therefore lined with little cafes and restaurants which all have menus in English, which is sooooo good because Chinese food is actually really good if you know what you're ordering. So we've been able to enjoy a delicious amount of Kung Pao Chicken, dumplings, noodles and other Panda Express-like dishes. Western breakfasts are also abundant and quite a nice change from the rice and spicy toppings that are usually eaten.

Even though Yangshuo is really not your typical China, it has some aspects that are far from Western culture. The market for example is not for a weak stomach. It is loud, busy and full of what we would consider animal cruelty. Slaughtering, especially that of dogs is a shocking sight. 

So yeah, our experience here has been interesting and fun so far. It's a really fun place to be. We are planning on doing a little bamboo raft trip up and down the river, a cormorant fishing trip and definitely lots more climbing. For more pictures check out our Facebook Photo Folders.

For the purpose of sharing our experience we have decided to post some market pictures.  

 WARNING!!! THE FOLLOWING IMAGES MAY BE DISTURBING TO YOU! IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO THIS KIND OF STUFF, DON'T SCROLL DOWN!!!  

 

HuYaY!

OK, so we're still figuring out how to use this so called "Mackimtosh", and can't figure out how to move pictures around (Rach and Dan, any hints?) so the pictures are out of order. Sorry.

WOOOOOW! We made it to Yangshuo yesterday, and it's beautiful! It was an awesome bus-ride from Guangzhou. It got more and more beautiful the closer we got. I reckon I should write a little about Guangzhou first though.

Guangzhou is much bigger than we had thought. For some reason I thought that there were only 3 million people there, but it turns out, the actual statistic is somewhere around 10 million. Building-wise it was more spread out than New York City. Lots of skyscrapers, but not as densely packed. But people-wise, it was the biggest city I've ever seen. You know in movies where it shows the main character walking down an incredibly crowded street, surrounded by millions of people? That's Guangzhou.

We had a pretty good time there, but ironically enough, food was hard to find. Almost nothing was in English, and restaurants were few and far between compared to Thailand (where every 3rd shop is a restaurant). The other thing that was difficult is that no one speaks A WORD of English. Can't complain though, after all I'm in China and I speak 2 words of Chinese (I've got 'hello' and 'thank you' nailed). Our hotel had a restaurant in it, but the English in the menu was really hard to understand, and all the food was soooo different. We were laughing as soon as we opened the menu. They had ox penis, fish head, snake, chicken entrails, pork uterus, "duck chin",  "old pigeon", pig head (they had a picture of that one, and it looked delicious...) and lots of other things we had never heard of. I actually tried to order the snake, but they said they were out. The next day we went into a restaurant called "Great Chicken" thinking we'd be able to avoid the ultra-strange foods and order in English, or maybe see an English menu. Nope and nope. They brought us a menu in Chinese with no pictures. They kept coming back to our table to see if we were ready to order. On the waitress' third time back we decided to just point at words. So we just pointed at random Chinese characters hoping for the best. The funny part was that she clarified mine with me like three times ('Wait, this one or this one?') In the end, I had ordered some kind of pork ribby things, and Kat got the mystery meat (we couldn't tell if it was intestines or ear, but still tasted OK actually).

We went to a market in the downtown one day. It was really interesting. The biggest things that they were selling everywhere were ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine. Lots of roots and plants and herbs, and lots of different animal parts depending on your ailment. We talked to one guy about why he was selling dried fawn tails (which smelled awful), and he said that they make you very strong. Same with the dried sea-horses. We didn't ask about the 15 different kinds of dried penises, but we're assuming it's for potency. We saw tiger skins, tubs of live scorpions (as food, not as pets), dried lizards and snakes, live turtles, snakes, and fish (as food), HUUUUGE mushrooms, and all sorts of other random things. Fun times.

So we got in to Yangshuo last night, and it's like a miniature Las Vegas in the mountains. Lots of shops and restaurants, and lots of English (yeah, I'm not as adventurous as I used to be). We're planning on heading out to one of the crags today to do a little climbing. From what we saw on the bus-ride here the climbing looks incredible. I've never seen anywhere like this place. It's like southern Thailand with 50 times more karsts. Anyway, I'll post a few pictures of the drive over and we'll post more soon.