Guilin and Yangshuo

When we arrived in Guilin, we quickly and easily checked into our hostel. Our train arrived at nine and we were out strolling around the city by ten. We were immediately impressed with Guilin. The city is full of water. There are three rivers flowing past karst peaks. All the streets are tree-lined, and everything was still nice and green. It was a little cloudy and blustery, but it was still beautiful.

First we went to Solitary Beauty Peak. It is a karst mountain in the middle of town with a small complex surrounding it. Apparently, Sun Yatsen took residency there at some point. Grace questioned the fifty yuan entrance fee, and ultimately, she turned out to be right to be skeptical of it's worth. We climbed the stairs to the peak for a nice view, and a tour guide let us in the cave under the mountain.

We spent the afternoon strolling around the rivers and lakes. My stomach had been a little upset since the morning, so we decided to take a nap to see if that would help. It did, and we enjoyed some pizza for dinner. Afterwards we watched the fountain, lights, and music show out on the lake. It was something the Chinese could have made horribly cheesy, but they didn't. We sat by the lake for awhile and enjoyed ourselves.

In the night, my upset stomach culminated in me throwing up. It was relieving because I felt better immediately afterwards.

The next morning, Grace and I went to the police station to get her visa extended. We rented bikes to cover more distance during the day. The rental cost only twenty yuan and there was no deposit, but they told us that if we lost them they would cost five hundred yuan a piece. We got the the police station at nine and they told us that the visa office was in a meeting. After over an hour passed, there was no sign of the visa staff and people were piling us for visa services. We decided to go do something and come back after lunch.

We went to nearby Seven Star Park. The seven peaks in the park are supposed to look like the big dipper. It was the best park I've been to in China. Cheesy music was noticeably missing; the scenery was great. Grace and I wondered off the path and ended up climbing up one of the peaks. It wasn't very difficult, but after we took a look at the hill from a distance, we were more impressed with ourselves. The view from on top was nice, but it was still as cloudy and hazy as the day before. We blazed our own path up, but we saw the way others normally came when we reached the top. We took their less grueling path back down.

We still had some time to kill before the police station reopened after lunch. We had lunch and wandered until it was time to get back to the police station. We walked out of the gate to the part and I pointed to the place where our bikes were locked. There were no bikes. We ran over. Our lock was cleanly cut and placed in the basket of a bike that was locked to the same pole ours was.

There was actually deliberation on where to put our bikes when we arrived. Most bikes were parked in this one area but not locked to anything. We chose to put our bikes on a light pole near the street. There were many people walking by and many cars going past. We locked both our bikes together through the wheels and then locked then to the pole. Only my lock that went around both bikes and the pole was cut, so someone took the two bikes and put them in a truck. Luckily, we were already on our way to the police station.

When we got to the police station, we were served promptly. Grace handled her visa paperwork, and I was told that we had to go to a different police station to report our stolen bikes. Grace had to get a photo and copies of her visa made to finish processing it, so we decided to finish that first.

We were referred to a photo shop out of the station on our right, and directions from locals lead us back and forth down the street for what seemed like hours. When we finally arrived at the photo shop, we were told that we would have to wait till four to get our pictures. Our bikes were stolen between 10:00 and 2:30, so I assumed that the police's chances of recovering the bikes were significantly dropping. We debated whether or not to report the bikes, the Lonely Planet said that the police sometimes recover stolen articles. Four o'clock turned into five o'clock four our pictures. However, waiting the extra time led to a new shift at the visa office and new time to return for Grace's new visa. Originally, we had been told it would be ready in a week, next Monday, but the new officer told us it would be ready on Friday.

We then trudged onward to the police station. I managed to get across what was stolen, when, and where, but communication was difficult. I was really pleased with the demeanor of the police; they were very patient with us and pleasant. The told us to go back to our hostel and have them translate for us.

When we returned to the hostel, we had them call the police. After having them translate some things, they wanted me to show them where exactly the bicycles were stolen. I took a cab with one of the hostel workers and showed them where the bikes were, and we went to a different police station. The police officer there said that they would start looking for the bikes the next day after they had the receipts from the bikes. The employee encouraged me by saying that the police had recovered two stolen bikes for their hostel before. Regardless, I had to go to an ATM and fork over one thousand yuan. The bikes weren't Beijing clunkers, but they certainly make a substantial profit on them.

The next morning we got our things together and left for Yangshuo. The bus only took an hour, but in that time Grace's stomach got upset. We checked into our new hostel. Down one thousand yuan, we opted for the ten yuan beds for our stay. The roof is slanted; I can't stand up all the way; there is no heat; and the music was blaring in our rooms from the clubs on the street last night. You get what you pay for, but I still slept fine.

Yangshuo is even more impressive than Guilin. The rock faces are sharper and the village runs right up next to the peaks. The town is catered to backpackers, so I've enjoyed lasagna, blueberry cheesecake, and banana pancakes since I've been here.

After wandering around town for awhile on arrival, Grace leaned over a rail by the river and threw up. Mostly since we've been here we've only walked around town and ate. Last night a fellow traveler advertised five yuan beer from the second floor of a restaurant. We went up and chatted with them for a while, and they saw some people with whom they had taken a tour earlier in the week. They turned out to be two brothers who were photographers for National Geographic who had been working in a story in Hong Kong about shark fin soup. We reveled over them having everyone's dream job. They were actually born and raised in Bermuda, but had take residency in Colorado during their adolescence. Our conversation was cut short by Grace becoming sick again, and we returned to her rail for a more violent vomiting session. We went ahead and went to bed. Grace threw up two more in our bathroom during the night.

Today, Grace's condition has only improved slightly. She's stopped throwing up, but she is still pretty incapacitated. We took a long walk this morning, but we returned not long afterwards so Grace could take a nap. I took one with her to keep her company. We hoped to get two days of bike riding in before we returned to Guilin, but I'm still hopeful that Grace will improve over the day and we'll get a full day of something in tomorrow. We are carrying some good medicine and we upped the strength of her medicine from over the counter to prescription.

Crystal's Village

Here is the second installment of my journal entries. Make sure to check out the corresponding album on my picture site to see what everything looked like.


I just woke up from my first night on the hard sleeper car on the train. It was such a treat; I could barely stop smiling. It was so comfortable; I didn't have to push through people to go to the bathroom or get hot water for my noodles. Getting there required a bit of persuasion though.

We decided to try to catch the train to Guilin from Luohe, but there were only standing tickets for the next three days. There was no bus to get us there either. Grace wanted to go back to Zhenghou to see if we could catch a train or a bus to Guilin from there. I pushed her to buy the standing ticket for the eight teen hour ride and promised her that if we could upgrade to the hard sleeper, we would. I just wanted to keep moving in the right direction even at the expense of comfort. If we had went to Zhengzhou there was no assurance that we could get to Guilin that day and waiting in Zhengzhou for a seat would have been extremely boring.

Grace reluctantly agreed to buy the standing ticket. Crystal helped us buy some stools as insurance and sent us with a note to explain that we wanted to upgrade our tickets.

We sat in the train station waiting for our train, and a couple of minutes before the train was supposed to arrive, a train station attendant came out and told everyone waiting for the train something. Everyone lined up and started walking away from the waiting area; we had no clue what was said, so we just followed the line.

The line went out of the train station and toward another entrance. The attendant that lead the line waited at the entrance and collected ten yuan from everyone walking in. Completely clueless about what was happening, I told the attendant that I wanted to buy a ticket for the hard sleeper. She was confused, understandably given what was actually happening, but she did let us in for free. We were lead into the first-class waiting room, and after chatting with some other attendants, I found out that our train had been delayed thirty minutes. While waiting, we got to watch the end of the Nuggets-Cavs game on the biggest TV I've seen in China.

When our train arrived, we handed our note to someone working on the train; I said we wanted harder sleeper tickets, and we were whisked away to the sleeper car. We upgraded our tickets with no problems.

I'm really glad that everything worked out on the first occasion because if it hadn't, Grace's trust in my asking to take small risks would have lessened for the rest of the trip. As it is , I have this as evidence that everything will turn out fine.


We arrived in Zhengzhou on Thursday morning at 7:30. We took some time to freshen up and eat some breakfast at a nearby McDonald's. With the help of Crystal's directions, we were on a bus bound for the seat of his county, Wuyang, by nine o'clock.

Before we even got off the bus in Wuyang, we spotted Crystal. He took us to the beauty salon that his three older sisters run. We sat our bags down and went to lunch with two of them.

After lunch, we took a minibus to the village where Crystal grew up, Zhanggudong, His parents still live there, and we went to their house right away. All the houses in the village had high concrete or brick walls around them. There was a little, open concrete area before the house where Crystal's family kept chickens, a goat, and some vegetables. They also had a well, clotheslines running criss-cross from the walls with two dead chickens hanging there, and a tiny brown dog named Bao Bao. The entire house and roof was made from concrete. There were stairs leading to the flat roof running along the side of their house. In addition to his parents being there, his grandmother came from a couple houses down to greet us.

We spent the afternoon strolling through the village. The trees were bare and gray, but the fields encircling the village were green with sprouting wheat. People popped out of their houses to look at us as we walked by. Crystal met everyone by asking if they had eaten yet. I asked him why he greeted everyone this way, and he told me it is a polite greeting. Dried corn stalks were plied everywhere; they burned them instead of wood to keep warm since the trees in the area are sparse.

We wandered past a small stream and then a larger river that had slowly cut through the plain. As the sun set, the view embodied the romanticized image of village life. Green fields, trees, and the setting sun were reflected off the tranquil stream. Crystal pointed to a mountain in the distance and said that the cave inside the mountain was a beautiful palace. There he became blood-brothers with one of the monks.

Crystal told us stories about what he called the best time in his life, his childhood. He showed us the places where he swam in the summers and killed frogs with blow guns to enjoy as a snack.

He also showed us how the village had changed since he left. He said that along the river there were large trees that he played in with his friends, but now the river was devoid of trees. They were cut down so someone could dredge sand from the river and sell it.

We learned a little more about Crystal's life along that walk. He went to elementary school in a nearby village until age twelve. For middle and high school, he went to public boarding schools in Wuyang, so at twelve, he was out of the house and essentially living on his own. He said he was happy to leave his home for school. One time, he told me a story about being robbed at knife point while he stayed at school over the weekend in high school; the story never quite made sense to me until he told me that he went to boarding school. Apparently, this boarding school system is pretty common for villages in China.

We returned to his parents home for dinner. It was pretty rough for Grace and I. There was a mushroom and pepper dish, carrots that tasted like baijiu, mushroom soup, and big, fluffy rolls. Neither Grace nor I are fond of mushrooms at all, and the preparation of these rendered them very chewy. I enjoyed the broth of the soup and ate whatever they insisted I eat, but I didn't make it half way through my soup. Grace could only stomach the bread. We felt bad because most people in the village were standing outside with bowls of rice porridge, so it was obvious that this was a special meal. I told Grace to eat a couple times through my teeth, but neither of us could do justice to the meal.

The weather had been very pleasant, especially compared to Harbin, but when the sun went down, it became frigid. I wasn't prepared with my Harbin clothing, so I was frozen. I was far colder there, thousands of miles south of Harbin. Grace had more clothes than I, so she wasn't bad off. Before we could go to bed, we had to wash our feet; I wasn't too happy about taking my shoes and socks off. I didn't pay attention to the sleeping arrangements for Crystal and his parents that night, but Grace and I were put in a bed that was simply wooden crates pushed together with a comforter on top. I left on all of my clothes and crawled under the blankets, and when Grace got under the covers, I tried my best to steal all her heat.

The next morning, we woke up late by the village's standards. Breakfast was ready within minutes. We had Chinese breakfast burritos. There were standard flour tortillas with egg, green pepper, and dried, roasted duck. The left over mushrooms and carrots were brought back out, but they didn't make it into our first burritos. When they fixed my second burrito for me, it included the undesirable dishes, but I enjoyed breakfast anyway.

We went over to Crystal's grandmother's house after breakfast. Her house had brick walls, and the interior was wall papered with newspapers; The roof was made from woven sticks. In her courtyard area, crops were growing. She was glad to see us and pulled out her one frame of pictures to show us. It was a collage of dirt and water damaged pictures of her family. Sifting through the pictures, we got the story of part of their family tree.

Crystal's great-grandfather was a member of Shang Kaishek's army. There were five officers from their village in the army including Crystal's great-grandfather. After the Communists took over, the other four officers and their families fled to Taiwan; Crystal's great grandfather decided to stay in mainland China. He thought what he did was right and that the new government would respect his decision to stay. Communist troops came to the village and executed him. Supposedly, the other four families are very in Taiwan now. Crystal's great-grandmother died giving birth to his grandfather, but his great-grandfather remarried. His grandfather's stepmother also died young. His grandparents had three children: Crystal's father and his two aunts. His grandfather died when Crystal was four. He only remembers crying at his funeral.

I asked Crystal if older people in the village didn't like Chairman Mao because people in the village fought for the Nationalists. He said that some of them didn't. I asked what Crystal thought of Chairman Mao. He told me that Mao was the right person to lead the war but wasn't the right person to run the country, and the country would have been better off without the Cultural Revolution. I said that I couldn't understand Chinese people's admiration for Mao considering what happened during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. I commented that the type of government Mao fought against is how the Chinese government is run today. Crystal said that many injustices happen because there is no separation of the government, courts, and police. I asked why he chose to join the Communist Party since he had these criticisms of the government. He said joining the Party would be good for his future.

It was still very cold that morning, and sitting in the cold, shaded house didn't help things. Crystal offered to show us his elementary school, and we were eager to get moving and get our blood flowing. His grandmother asked for us to stay and offered to start a fire, but we declined.

On the way over to the next village to see Crystal's elementary school, some people had started a fire with corn stalks in the middle of the road. During the winter, there is no work to be done in the fields, so people just hang out and chat. Goats were grazing and standing on top of the dirt mound tombs in the fields. I ran around trying to pet the goats for a little while, but found out that they weren't like the one's in the petting zoo. They evaded me, and we continued on to the next village.

Along the way, Crystal said that mice would tear up the roots and eat the crops, so they want to get rid of them. When he and his friends were younger, they would catch mice and put beans in their butt to kill them. This would make them go crazy and kill all the other mice. Then the bean would grow and kill the mouse. Furthermore, he claimed that the mice holes in the field were very nice homes and complete with a bedroom, living room, and kitchen.

The next village over look almost exactly the same as Crystal's. We just strolled right into school and had a look around. Class was still in session, and we peaked in to the detriment of classroom productivity. The school was built like a small motel. The two stories of classrooms opened to outdoor hallways. Crystal said that when he was in school, kids from different villages would fight each other. During school they would climb the trees in the courtyard of the school and read books. The teacher would slice watermelon and throw it to them in the tree.

A student popped out of one of the upstairs classrooms to ring the bell, and all the classes filed into the courtyard. Grace and I were surrounded by little eyes that had almost certainly never seen a white person before. I tried to chat with some of them, but they were too shy for that. A circle formed around me, and brave students dashed across through the circle as close as they could to me without being in danger of being eaten by the giant, white monster. I played along and lunged into the circle; smiling and screaming students scattered in a way that was not unlike chasing the goats. I captured one of the littlest ones and threw him over my shoulder. After a good spinning, he was released. The bell rang again, and the students filed back into their classes.

We returned to Crystal's home for lunch. The two dead chickens that were hanging on the clothesline when we arrived had made their way into a stew with chopped carrots and what Crystal called white carrots. No part of the chicken was spared, so the stew was complete with bones, organs, two heads, and four feet. It was a test to guess what part of the chicken you were eating. It was a good stew and was my favorite meal that we had in the village.

We packed up our bags and started making our way back to town. Walking along to the bus stop, people peeked out of their houses to get one last look at us. Crystal decided that it would be better for us to take a motor tricycles into town rather than wait for the bus.

When we returned to town, we had discovered it was a market day. The city was swollen with people and stands selling everything from food and clothing to appliances and mopeds. We put our bags back into the beauty salon, and set out into town in search of train or bus tickets to Guilin for the next day.

One the way to the office that sold train tickets, we observed a curious event. A man was sitting on the back of a pickup truck and speaking on a microphone over the two large speakers that were behind him. In front of him, there were a few unopened boxes stacked on top of each other. People were crowded all around the truck holding up bills in their hands in denominations all the way to one hundred. After working the crowd, he opened the boxes and revealed the mystery product, shampoo. He began exchanging the shampoo for one hundred yuan bills that were raised in the air. More people came up and gave him money. This shampoo didn't look very special. It was average in size and plainly packaged in a dull orange bottle. There wasn't even English on the bottles. I asked Crystal what he was saying to get the people to buy the shampoo, but he couldn't explain.

A trip to the train office revealed that there were no seat on the train from Luohe to Guilin the next day. The following trip to the bus station informed us that there was no direct route from Wuyang to Guilin. When we got back to the beauty salon, a customer there told us that there was a bus from Luohe to Guilin and called someone to confirm it.

Grace was offered a free facial from one of Crystal's sisters. I later found out that this treatment consisted of putting different lotions on her face and getting her head and shoulders rubbed and beaten. In the meantime, Crystal said that since there were not enough places for us to sleep, the had gotten us a hotel room. I objected to them paying for it, but they refused to take my money. Crystal and I moved our bags over to the hotel, and Grace's facial was finished when we returned. We went out to dinner and went to bed.

In the morning, we took baths at a bath house near our hotel. Afterwards, we hopped on a bus to Luohe to seek onward transportation.

Begining of the Travel Posts: On the Train

As always, I apologize for the delay in putting up this post. There has been a drastic change in my situation that has hindered my writing. I have returned to America. I have been in the Atlanta area for over two weeks now and have established myself with a place to live and a job. I'm living in Decatur and last night was my first night working at Dante's Down the Hatch in Lenox.

I'm still going to provide the narrative that lead to this conclusion of my story in China. However, I plan on doing it in intervals. I've put off writing these series of posts for a while, but hopefully over the course of the next week I should have them finished.

I think its appropriate to provide some background into what I was thinking going into the trip. My plan upon returning to China had been to go law school. With application deadlines fast approaching before I left to travel, I decided not to apply. Three years of law school would leave me with a massive debt and preparation for a job that I wasn't sure that I wanted to do. Even if I went to law school, I could eventually change careers, but realistically only after paying my debt. By that time, my twenties would have evaporated. Law school was only the link between point A, having majored in philosophy and religion, and point B, having a job, but I came to the conclusion that there were other fields where I could find employment with having to incur the bind of law school debt.

With that decision made, Grace and I were planning on returning to Atlanta after leaving China. Since Grace's mother works for Emory University, she could go there for free, and I could try to find a job in Atlanta. On the other hand, Atlanta had never been a place I considered living by my own volition, so we agreed that after she finished her degree in two years, everything would be back on the table in terms of where in the world we went and what we did. This new plan also left questions as to what exactly I would do for a career, and for the most part, these questions linger.

That should be ample background into the way I was thinking at the time. Over the course of the trip, I wrote a couple journal entries. These provide obvious divisions for my posts. Whenever I read my own writing after it has sat for some time, it makes me feel like a pretentious asshole (maybe I am), and in reading back through my journal, I want to change some things. But, I really don't think changing the writing gives an accurate picture of what or how I was thinking thinking at the time, so I've left the journal entries in tact except for the spelling and grammar mistakes I can catch. So without further ado, my first journal entry.

The twenty-two hour train stretch on the hard seats is almost over. We are an hour and a half away from Zhengzhou. We got up this morning with the sun, got on a train, watched it set in these seats, and we'll see it rise again as we arrive.

Everything has went fairly smoothly on the train thus far. We were a little more rushed than I would have liked getting to our train this morning, but it was fine. I've been awake for the vast majority of the trip with the exception of two cat naps. Grace and I have mostly entertained ourselves with books and conversation. With our trusty Lonely Plant in hand, we concretized our plans a bit more. We set our sites and the amount of time we'll spend at each sites. The trip is supposed to be relaxed, fluid, and adventurous, and a firm schedule detracts from that feeling. However, some of our most exciting sites are at the end of our route, and we want to make sure that those places get sufficient time.

The proposed itinerary goes as follows: arrival at Crystal's farm sometime this afternoon; a full day there; on to Guilin in the morning pending train tickets (it should be one of our longest train ride on the trip to get to Guilin); three days in Guilin with the hopes of getting Grace's visa extended in that time; three days in Yangshuo; back through Guilin to peruse the minority villages around Sanjiang and Longsheng in northeastern Guangxi province and Kaili in eastern Guizhou province for a week; three days in Anshan to see Zhijin cave and Huangshuo Falls if we so choose; a day in Xingyi to traverse a gorge in the area; maybe a day in Kunming; south to Xishuangbanna for a week; back north to Dali for three days; three days in Lijiang; three days to hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge; three days to conclude our trip in Zhongdian and Tibetan area of Yunnan province. With this itinerary, I have a feeling we'll lose our two days allotted to get home and end up flying back to Harbin.

Grace and I took turns reading the first chapter of Stephan Hawking's A Brief History of Time and discussed. I spent most of my time sifting through the Lonely Planet reading about potential destinations for our next trip.

Traveling is a bizarre phenomenon. Here I am on the verge of the most exciting experience of my life, and I'm becoming enchanted with the places I'll go on my next trip. Traveling is generally though of as a higher pleasure, but I'm not sure if it is any different that run of the mill materialism. Travelers are out to collect experiences like most people are out to collect cars, houses, TVs, and furniture to fill their world. Both ways of life are expensive. I don't think it is appropriate to characterize traveling as a 'higher pleasure' in relation to a more materialistic life. Some argue that traveling is broadening; it makes you challenge your assumptions about how you own life must be lived. That may be true, but those are the byproducts rather than the goals of travel. Those who travel seek pleasure in travel just as those who buy things seek pleasure in that which they buy. I imagine those who travel solely for personal improvement are few in number. And my excitement about a trip further in the future on the eve on one trip shows that traveling can be just as consuming as materialism. Just as there is always something else you could buy; there is another cool place to go to that you haven't seen.

With that said, this trip equals the pinnacle of excitement I've felt in my life. I can't wait to get off the train and get things started.

Grace and I set timetables for events on the train to keep things moving. Lunch at one; dinner at seven; wine at nine. Instead of just waiting to get there, it gives you smaller, more manageable waits.

Wine or beer on the train is one of the best ways to pass the time... usually. This ride, the wine backfired on us a little. We had purchased two big bottles of Grand Dragon wine a while back knowing that they would be consumed eventually, but before we left, only one had been used. Grace suggested that we bring it along; I agreed even though I really wanted to just buy beer on the train.

We started drink probably around ten, and lively conversation ensued. Grace talked about the dynamics of Covington life. She also cursed herself by noting that she hadn't gotten sick from drinking since she arrived in China and she was proud of herself. Discussion eventually followed about my relationship with my brother. Things got a little heated as I perceived her to be lecturing me on how to approach my relationship with him. I shook my head, and she told me that that was how she was going to approach her relationship with my brother. I shook my head and disapproved citing my brother's character as the reason her methods wouldn't work with him. Things got hostile, and I realized how drunk she was and told her the conversation was over.

After about five minutes, Grace also realized how drunk she was. The train started spinning, and her stomach started turning. I encouraged her to go to the bathroom, but she wasn't feeling up to wading through the people standing in our car. A little while later, she demanded the plastic bags holding our snacks. She sat her head down on the table holding the bag and started throwing up. Although I wish I had been more helpful, I drank enough to make me tired and dosed on and off throughout her sickness. She would tap me when she wanted something; I would oblige her and fall back asleep. This went on for about an hour.

In the end, there was some vomit in the bag, but there was a trail draped down Grace's clothes starting at her chest and ending between her legs. Either the bag was dripping, or she was missing the bag, or both, but the floor is now sticky with dried vomit. The bag is also still sitting tied at our feet. Our bags for our food are gone, but we have room for it all in our little backpack. However, the backpack got a little damp in the process as well.

We are the only white people in the car, as is usually the case. We draw a lot of interest in the hard seater cars because the people that sit here have less money and therefore generally less exposure to foreigners. Just me sitting here writing in English at six in the morning draws a lot of attention. The guy that is sitting next to me has been looking over my shoulder while I write. He has a standing ticket, but he is sitting on his suitcase in the aisle. He has cleared his throat and spit on the ground, rubbing the mucus into the carpet about fifteen times now. People have certainly gone out of there way to look at my notebook as they pass.

It is now are estimated time of arrival, but we are now just stopping at our next to last stop. I think we'll have an extra half an hour to an hour left. Then we have to transfer to a bus to get to Crystal's village. That should take another three hours or so, but we'll certainly have to wait for the bus a little while. At first, I thought the trip to Crystal's would be a nice midpoint on the way south, but I'm coming to think that despite it being more or less on our route, it is a tangent from more interesting areas. I'm still very excited about seeing Chinese farm life, but I'm skeptical that the time couldn't be spent more enjoyably elsewhere.

That is all for my first journal entry. I'll try to put the next one up tomorrow. I've posted all the pictures from the trip on my picture site, but I would recommend waiting to read about them before you look. I also put up the pictures from the trip with my family to Beijing on there; go ahead and take a look. I know its a bad time to post this because it's UGA Spring Break, but hopefully by the time everyone gets back to school there will be plenty of material for procrastinating from school work. Feel free to contact me through more traditional means now, as I still have the same cellphone number.