long tan

sorry about the problem with the link! it has been a bit confusing here. the city i was in was yangshuo. when the chinese tourists came it turned into daytona beach on spring break. i almost lost it. so, the village we are living in is long tan (dragon pool) which is overlooked by long shan (dragon hill/mountain). Ya Ge has been asking the local people and we are guessing that that houses in the pictures are about 500 years old, maybe a little bit more. we can say for sure at this point that we are the first travelers to ever stay here. the family is wonderful, we have all our meals with them!

other than that no other interesting adventures. i had to go to the hospital the other day for a rash i had on my leg. that was not too good. it cost .50USD to see the doctor, and then 23USD for medicince that i did not need. at first i was a bit upset, but just knowing what i had, and how to get rid of it for 23 bucks was worth the money.

this view here is from the bathroom that we share. it looks out onto the karst (type of limestone) mountains. it is too bad there are not many trails here, it would be nice to go hiking around.

last nite there was (to me) a terrible storm. it felt as if the wold town would fall over, with lightning and rain on top of it.

this picture is of the street we walk down to the house that we are living in. we meet a nice grandma the other day (90 years old) and still making tofu! we bought some, which we ate for dinner. two big cubes of tofo was .12usd.

i love this picture. the water buffalo stay in the river during the day, and hang out in the dragon pool. this is the house we are living in.

3 days ago we went climbing. it was too easy for me, but it was ya ge's first time, and she had a blast. the climbing here is pretty good, i would like to do some more in the next few days.

the same nite as the climbing we saw the local opera on the water! it was actually very amazing. if the internet was not so slow, i would upload some of the video i took of the concert.

not much time to explain everything, but all in all everything has been quite nice and peaceful.

yangshuo

so, i have been in beijing for the last ten days with my friend ya ge. we decided to go to yangshuo for the national holiday. yangshuo is located in southern china. it is an autonomous region, the province is guangxi. we decided to go by train to see the country. it was a 27hr train ride, that covered about 2000km. many of the people we met on the train were very nice.

when we arrived into the city it was raining, and the next day was not too much fun. i was quite tired of sitting in a train all day, but still did not want to do much.

today it was very nice. took a bike ride for about 4-5 hours around the little villages. ya ge and i ended up in an ancient village and decided to see if we could get room there for a few days because of the may holiday that is approaching. we agreed to pay 12usd for 3 nites (total) and that would include all of our food. the city is about 300 years old. i will get pictures of that later!

on the way we saw many of the sites that the area has to offer. this is one of the most impressive areas. it is moon hill. ya ge and i will be climbing tomorrow, but this area only offers more difficult climbing so we will be going somewhere else. if i get a change i would like to climb this route.

thats it for now.