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.