We had spent the majority of the summer in our China home either helping with summer camps or recovering from helping with summer camps. 

 

There were only about three weeks left until school started up again and I’d been feeling particularly eager to get out of the city – not just ours – but any and every city. I* wanted to be outside and see something with a bit of grandeur. It’s hard for something manmade to be truly grand; piles of cement just don’t do the same thing that piles of giant boulders do for a person. It’s a funny thing that men can work for years and years to build a wonder and then God still wins first prize by merely heaping up rocks – or brushing them aside for that matter. 

 

We had reasons for staying in country this trip: 

 

1) Domestic (should be) cheaper

2) This was probably our only chance to travel in China (if we kept to the original 2 year plan)

3) If we were going to be living in China, well, we thought we should. It seemed like keeping inside our five square miles wasn’t the best way to gain a broader and more accurate idea of what “China” was. Staying in just one city, surrounded primarily by one demographic, and one boring landscape wasn’t giving a fair picture. In fact, it had begun to give us a rather skewed picture. Despite how thankful I was to be there, our fair city – to be honest, wasn’t exactly the pretty side of the Industrial Revolution. And I knew there must be nicer places, other demographics, and a variety of dispositions in other parts of China.

4) It was an opportunity to be forced into using the 15.5 words of Chinese we knew.

 

To my delight, China’s vast terrain is widely diverse – similar to the United States’. So I took a few days to make up a wish list and trim it down to a doable itinerary – which was just about as difficult as going on a shopping spree.

 

In brief detail, here is the itinerary I finally settled on (with input from the rest of the group: James and a student friend):

 

– Yunnan Province:

(city/ main attraction)

·      Kunming: Stone Forest

·      Lijiang (ancient city): Jade Dragon Snow Mountain/ hike Tiger Leaping Gorge

·      Shangrila: Shangrila 

Hunan Province:

·      Changsha: Eat lots of Hunan food

·      Zhangjiajie (national park): Fantastic, spindly mountains – like in the movie Avatar

Shaanxi Province:

·      Xi’an: Terracotta warriors/ old city wall

 

Also, we decided to bring less luggage – obviously, because we are very, very organized always. That would be nice. Truth is, we (but I’ll chalk it up to me) tend to bring too much. Somehow, without fail, I always bring an excess; there is always a t-shirt taking up space in my bag that I didn’t wear and some useful gadget that I didn’t use. So I considered this an experiment to see what few and essential items one (or, in this case, two persons) really needed for two weeks on the road. That’s the explanation for the odd little title photo; that was our entire travel ensemble. 

 

Next episode: The trip begins…. will we fall or stagger on?? (gotta love those double interogatives)

 

 

*You may be wondering why, as a married person, I don’t replace “I” with “we” here. While I understand – I think – why married people often do this, I don’t really feel that it’s exactly honest or fair. While we’re united in our purpose we’re not always identical in the thoughts that brought us to that purpose. It’s the synergy of two ideas that gets us there. For example, me saying something like, “Let’s go there!” and James saying something like, “Humph.” Just kidding. It’s not just like that; James usually doesn’t agree so readily. So when they are my thoughts, I’ll use the singular instead of assigning sentiments to James that weren’t exactly his. James and I are a team. We cover the bases, divid the work. I just happen to think it’s a great idea before we go and he tends to think it’s a great idea after we’ve gone. There, now you know more than you ever wanted to – or needed to. Nosey.