Thursday, October 8, 2009

Guilin photos

We're safely back in Shanghai, trying to prepare ourselves to jump back into work mode. (Yup, we have to teach on the Friday and Saturday following break...)

As a fun distraction, though, we've begun to wade through our pictures from our trip. As you can imagine, we took A LOT - close to 1,000! (Thank goodness for the extra memory card for our camera!) We'll post them here in separate albums, so stay tuned. Also, I'm trying out Shutterfly's photo sharing site (see our new site there: hsinchina.shutterfly.com), as it seems more user-friendly than what we have been using. Hope it seems that way to you.
 
Anyway, the first album is of Guilin. To re-cap, Guilin is located in Guangxi Province, in southern China, about 250 miles from Vietnam. It is most famous for its limestone karst peaks (the subjects of many traditional Chinese paintings.) We climbed one, the Solitary Beauty Peak, in the center of the city for an awesome view of the city and its outlying areas. But, we found that Guilin had a lot more to offer than that. Other highlights included: its enormous night market; two large lakes in the middle of town; the Reed Flute Cave (large enough to serve as an air-raid shelter for over 1,000 people during WWII); people lighting and sending skyward fire lanterns to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival; and, maybe most of all, its regional rice noodle dish, guilin mifen, spicy deliciousness sold by street vendors everywhere you turn for 3rmb (about 40 cents.) We did a lot of walking in Guilin (over 15 miles on one day) and treated ourselves to a traditional foot bath and massage that night. The picture of Jeff's feet soaking is of the bath part - our feet were soaked in a mixture of herbs and spices before being massaged. They came out smelling like Christmas cookies and feeling soft as a baby's bottom.
 
Here's the link to the pictures:http://hsinchina.shutterfly.com/26. Stay tuned for Part II!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for all the wonderful photos and journal entries!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks great ... I'm looking forward to being there in January.

    ReplyDelete