A Hasty Wrap Up...

I don't have time to get the whole trip blogged before we head back and start packing for our road trip, so I'll attempt to give a very brief wrap up of the rest of our Chinese Adventure here, and give a full accounting on our Website when we get back from Himachal Pradesh trip.

Suffice it to say, that this China vacation has been the "trip of a lifetime" and we are forever changed because of it. I left off with Tongli so that leads us to our next stop of Shanghai. We met Smitty at the train station and walked about 20 minutes to his amazing apartment. Shanghai was amazing, and the highlight of that portion of our trip was the "Shanghai Death March" (as we are calling it) because of the insane heat and humidity that day. I don't know how many km we walked, but we saw Yuyuan Gardens and Market, People's Square, the City Planning Museum, and walked down Nanjing Street to the Bund with magnificent view of the Pearl Tower.

McFam on the Bund - Pearl Tower in the background

After Shanghai, we trained it back to Nanjing for another few "down days" and saw some really cool, very old stuff. I know, I know... I'm not doing any of this justice, but once I'm back on my own turf with my own keyboard, I promise to do a proper de-briefing.

Sun Yat Sen - Memorial to Father of Modern China

Wall ruins surrounding a Ming Era Tomb

The last part of our journey was spent in "heaven." The Guilin area of China is some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

Top of Moon Hill

Well, that's all I have time for... we're out the door for dinner at Outback Steakhouse (beef!) before we head to the airport and head home to India.

Where did they go?

We haven't forgotten about you, our faithful readers (thanks Mom!), but we are in our whirlwind windup of our China trip down in Guilin. I won't assume we'll have internet connectivity at our next hotel, and so I won't be blogging, but we're still alive and loving this amazing country... today we get to do our Li River Cruise. We head back to Beijing on Monday and leave China on Tuesday. Look for a blog one of those days...

Tongli - the Venice of the East

We took a bullet train to Suzhou (I know I'm not spelling or pronouncing any of these names correctly) and really enjoyed riding in style. Very similar to the Japanese bullet trains, these are relatively clean and comfortable cars. The kids had a great time. Once we arrived in Suzhou we hired a van to take us the next hour north to Tongli, a canal town that has been around since the 9th century. To date, this has been my favorite stop. I can't do it justice on Dave's blog, but I'll include a few of my favorite photos here and keep the write up brief.

Girls on the train - McDs, Nintendo DS, iPod... check!

To begin with we had to pay to actually enter the town. Supposedly, prior to this fee you'd pay for each site you visited within the town, but too many people skipped the sites and just enjoyed strolling the canals. We found our fabulous hotel, the Zhengfu Caotang, which featured a traditional Chinese courtyard surrounded by beautifully decorated rooms with antique furniture. Our family had 3 unique rooms, mom & dad, boys, and girls' rooms. I was a little anxious about leaving the girls in a room by themselves, but they did beautifully and felt so very grown up.

We dropped off our luggage, oogled our rooms, and headed out to see the town. We took so many photographs as the entire town was so picturesque. We hopped on a cute little boat for a canal "cruise" that was short and sweet, but gave us a great overview of the area we would walk around later. We ate dinner at a canal side restaurant which featured some interesting dishes, but no one starved, and enjoyed an after dinner stroll/explore through some quaint alleyways. We dropped the kids back at the hotel and continued to explore/shop a little later into the night. It was smoking hot and miserably humid, but after a shower and some serious mosquito netting/repellent, we were able to sleep soundly.

Z was a luggage pulling fool - we couldn't have done this without him

Entrance to our hotel

Wonderful waterways - I love this place

Working in the water - washing, cooking, whatever...

Amazing evening

The morning was excessively humid which resulted in cloudy lenses on the cameras for the first little while. Both the girls got silk jammies and decorative umbrellas on this leg of the trip. We hired 4 pedicabs, (or bicycle rickshaws for those of you in India) and took a tour of some of the sites. We were supposed to stop at 8 sites, but enjoyed the 2nd site so much, 2 was all we could manage before we had to head back to the train station.

The Pearl Pagoda was our favorite stop, at least from the kids perspective because they got to feed the insane koi who were leaping over each other for food, and roll around in a plastic bubble on top of the water.

Pedicabs

Catching Koi

Bubble boy?

Z, A & B in bubbles...

Using the air hose to cool off

We were sad to leave Tongli, but not the heat and humidity. We took 3 taxis to the train station and went our separate ways for the weekend - the Littles headed back home to Nanjing, and we headed East to Shanghai for our next adventure...

Nanjing

The next several days were spent chillaxing at the Little's house (which is awesome BTW) with some little jaunts out and about to appreciate the great little town (population only 6,000,000). We've had trips to the awesome flea market, and Nanjing city museum at Chau Tian Gong. Eaten some fabulous kung pao chicken and hong shau rou by their adorable ayi. Swam in their gorgeous pool with a waterfall, walked on the awesome city walls, checked out a really awesome pagoda temple, and ate some really great food. The Littles have been amazing hosts. Here are some random photos of our first trip to Nanjing.

Nanjing City Museum - a great history of the city with cool maps of the city walls. Most Americans have no concept of what history really is... China is ANCIENT!

Cute baby at flea market - he wasn't for sale

Is it cheating to eat Indian food while we're in China? Well, technically it was Nepalese, but it was good, and we had been eating Chinese food almost a week. And... Dave got to practice his Hindi with the cook and another Indian diner who appreciated at taste of home.

Dan was tired of taxis - what an exhausting way to travel, especially when that's how you travel every day. I have a new respect for the Scholars who live in China... it would drive me insane!

Zac was loving the meat department at the Metro store, the local equivalent to Costco.
Look at tall the beef!

Enjoying the Little's community pool - it rocks!

The Ji Mind Si Temple Pagoda - this was a beautiful complex

The kids lit the insense that was given to them as we entered. There were many worshipers there paying homage to their ancestors. We just enjoyed playing with the fire and learning more about Buddhist culture. Dave and the 3 youngest climbed up to the top of the pagoda and got a great view of Nanjing.

The fam at the pagoda

The girls at the top of the pagoda

Climbing the city walls

Walking along the wall - this is the longest city wall in the world at more than 32 kilometers long. It was heavily damaged by the Japanese bombs dropped during WWII. Nanjing was also the location of a horrific massacre by the Japanese during this time.

B Little's calligraphy - he was practicing for his final the next day. I'd give him an A+

Chuga Chuga Choo Choo!

After our day checking out the Terra Cotta Army and the Huaqing Hot Springs, we had to catch the sleeper train from Xi'an to Nanjing - home to our fabulous hosts and tour guides the Littles. We picked up our bags from the hotel, ate a quick Pizza Hut lunch, and hustled to the Xi'an train station. The Littles had tried to prepare us for the chaos that would soon ensue, and we scoffed to think that anything could be worse than what we've experienced in India. We were wrong! It was a much different kind of chaos. It started as we entered the station itself: people were cutting and pushing just to get to the baggage screening station. With 11 people in our party, 7 of them children, I was a big nervous about getting separated. We found our "gate" and were shocked by the masses of people already posturing for the mad dash to their cars on our train. S Little had the great idea to check if they had a "soft seat" lounge, for 1st class cars. Luckily, they did and we were able to sit and wait for our boarding time, which was supposed to be before the rest of the horde. However, we were not first, but were able to get to our car without too much difficulty. Having already traveled by overnight train in Thailand we had our expectations of the minimum level of comfort we could handle. We were very pleasantly surprised by how clean and comfortable this option was for travel in China. We would definitely travel this way again. Check it out...

Not the soft seat lounge...

The soft seat lounge

That's our train

Breakfast - a lot less grease than our Chiang Mai trip, don't you think Lena?

The girls had their very own room - so very grown up

We made it... don't you love the bullet train?

Huaqing Hot Springs...

...is a beautiful spot at the base of Mount Lishan, near Xian. Historically, it is significant for two primary reasons. The first being the place where Emperor Xuanzong, the 7th emperor of the Tang dynasty (not associated with the zingy orange breakfast drink) had his downfall. Legend has it that his love for his concubine Yang Guifei was so obsessive that he let slide the affairs of the kingdom and eventually lost control. This was also the spot of the "Xi'an Incident" which involved the capture of Chiang Kai-Shek in December of 1936 by the Chinese Communist Party. The grounds are beautiful and lush, and the weather was drizzly leaving a misty shroud surrounding the mountain.

Misty mountains

Mom & B - love the architecture

A & B enjoying the hot water from the spring

Gorgeous gazebo

Ancient Chinese Secrets...

We woke up and packed out our hotel room in Xi'an since we'd be gone all day and unable to check out later. B Little had arranged a van and tour guide for our trip to see the Terra Cotta warriors. This had been on my list of "want to sees" ever since we even considered a trip to China, so I was pretty excited about this trip. The guide had us first stop at a tourist trap of a place where you could make your own terra cotta figure, but we just whipped through there and took advantage of the restroom before continuing on to the actual site. Apparently, the discovery of these warriors happened in 1974 by some farmers digging in their fields. The actual warriors themselves, and the tomb of Shi Huang Di, the first Emperor of China whose army they were, date back to 220 B.C. It was all that... and a bag of chips... we were NOT disappointed. However, due to the low lighting, most of our photos were more blurry than we would have liked. Here are the best of them...

Z - my warrior

The cavernous expanse of this site excavation

All in a row

What they looked like before being reassembled

Low light photography - really difficult to hold the
camera still enough to capture these images

There were 3 different buildings showcasing different finds of this site. Each soldier had a unique face, and specific rank and position. When they were originally found, they had bright color on them, which quickly faded when exposed to the light and air. They reburied several other finds to protect them until methods could be developed to prevent further deterioration. This was a highlight on our trip. After the warriors we headed to the Hot Springs...

On to Xi'an...

Saturday (the 14th) we woke up early (seeing a pattern here) for the less than 2 hour flight to Xi'an from Beijing. We mostly slept on the flight still trying to recover from the Great Day at the Great Wall back on day 1. It was an hour taxi ride from the airport to our hotel within the Xi'an city walls. We checked in, and went out on foot to find a place to eat lunch. We thought there was a pizza place down the street, but ended up eating at the food court in the ginormous mall. It was an interesting collection of food items we sampled, mostly pretty good. Right next to our table, was a bumper car place. The kids really wanted to try it out, so who are we to deny a good time on vacation? (I must include a reminder that, similar to India, OSHA doesn't live here.) They all jumped into their own cars, sans seatbelts (or with very weak attempts) and proceeded to inflict all sorts of minor brain injuries on each other. On three separate occasions in the seemingly hour long ride, little D, bumped his head so hard as to scream out and cry. The worker dude would crawl into his car and comfort him until he stopped and then keep going. After the third one, which was pretty brutal - would have sent a lesser 6 year old to the hospital with whiplash - I exercised my motherly duty and stopped his car indicating he should get out of the car. He revolted through his sobbing and insisted he keep driving. What was I thinking? How dare I try to cut his ride shorter than everyone else's?

After bumper cars we started our trek to the cutest little shopping area called Shuyuanmen. I was a blustery, rainy day and we ended up buying 10 umbrellas for the walk, for ridiculously cheap. I really enjoyed the ambiance of this adorable area, despite the rain. It was full of art, souvenirs, and antiques. We made a quick stop at the Beilin museum - a museum of stone sculptures which were very impressive, and then began the death march back to the hotel.

For dinner, we ate at a Muslim restaurant, that specialized in a strange pork soupy, noodle concoction, that was served over flat bread we broke up into tiny pieces ourselves. It was probably our most interesting meal on this trip.

After dinner, Sara, Allison and I braved the very crowded night market across the street from the hotel. We figured out it was a fish/meat market by day, and a trinket, jewelry, fake bag market by night. It was very entertaining, and I'm discovering how much I enjoy the whole Asia market scene.

Beijing airport at 0'dark thirty in the morning.

Bumper cars - Action Z

D - before 3rd concussion

Live models in the window

Shuyuanmen - the fabulous cobbled shopping street

At the museum, very pretty gardens

Hide and seek in the historic hitching posts

Watchtower on the wall

Monk on the phone - Hello mom?"

D falling asleep at our interesting Muslim dinner

Creatures at the night market - goldfish, bunnies, turtles and lizards

City walls of Xi'an - these walls form a giant rectangle that is flat on top. We had originally planned to take a bike ride tour around the entire wall, but the rain prevented that. We were a little disappointed by that, but really enjoyed the rest of Xi'an.