I have left Yangshuo, Hong Kong has come and gone, and now I am with a new tour group and we are back in China in a place called Kunming. I left my last entry talking about my great day in Yangshuo. What I didn't get to mention was that we had to oppourtunity to teach at a local school for the afternoon, which was absolutely amazing! We split into groups of twos and together taught two classes. I had 5th grade and 3rd grade. The fifth graders were a bit of a han...

The last two days have been amazing, by far the best two days so far. Yesterday, 10 of us got up, had breakfast and rented bikes for a ride in the countryside. We opted out of a getting a guide, wanting instead to be on our own, out of the tourist loop. Anyway, they were selling maps of bike routes so that's all we really needed anyway...right? The maps turned out to have a major gap in them. They showed a large map of all the bike routes around Yangshuo, and an ...

I love Yangshuo. If you can't tell from the photos, this place is gorgeous. It is surrounded by stunning mountains, alongside the CLEAR and CLEAN Li river, and filled with narrow streets with cafes and market stands. Here we are staying at a hotel called the Fawlty Towers, and despite its slightly crumbling appearance, it has some of the softest beds we've encountered so far (and that means a lot to a traveler in China). Getting here required taking a 24 hour t...

Imagine if China Town took over New York, and you would have Shanghai. If you tell from the picture, it's very westernized. Even though many of us feel more comfortable here, it is definitely still very Chinese. So, in the theme of Chinese, I thought I would take this blog entry to explain some very distinct aspects of Chinese Culture. 1. Public Displays of Spitting: Everyone spits here...and everywhere. On the street, in restaurants...everywhere. And it's not j...

I am extremely frustrated right now. My last blog entry was unfinished since the internet here cuts out without warning. I have spent the last 45 min updating my blog and the internet just cut out 30 min early, and I lost it all. I am not going to rewrite it for a third time so I will now do bullet points of what I wrote before. I am not happy. 1. Met the rest of the tour group the morning after the Forbidden City, everyone was really nice.2. Went to the Temple ...