"Perfect metropolis".

Now in Chengdu yet again after a five days in Lijiang, in northwestern Yunnan. The Old City there is a World Heritage Site, and makes Dali look like Disneyworld's Epcot Center (not to disrespect anything Disney). Besides eating copious amounts of Naxi food, our activities included exploring the twisting winding alleys of the ancient city, biking to a Naxi village (Baisha) famous for its frescoes, and spending a day fighting Chinese tour groups at the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain where we had to buy tanks of oxygen to deal with the altitude.

We also celebrated Spring Festival there, where we welcomed the Year of the Tiger by making jiaozi with the people at our hostel. Chinese New Year is celebrated by everything closing down for days (except for places like Lijiang that thrive on tourism) and people setting off fireworks and firecrackers nonstop from dawn until midnight, usually just as you're walking past -- causing your ears to ring for minutes afterwards.

Lijiang was, compared with other Chinese cities, inordinately expensive, especially considering my need to buy bags of Yunnan coffee everywhere we went. The weather was just as lovely as the rest of Yunnan though, and made the return to the exhaust-fume-colored sky of Chengdu rather more shocking than it should have been.

Because of S's lost passport, we couldn't fly from Lijiang to Chengdu as we had wanted. Instead, we had to take a 22-hour sleeper bus; as a result, I'm not sure I'm entirely sane anymore. The beds were the width of a regular bus seat, and S and I were in the very back row of five beds, squished between strangers -- literally squished, for there were no dividers between the beds. I'm also fairly certain they never wash the sheets, so an immediate shower was in order this morning when we arrived at our hostel. The only good point was that we were no on the top level of the bus. It was definitely not worth the nearly 300 RMB we payed, if anyone was ever insane enough to think about getting on a Chinese bus for longer than 10 hours and trying to sleep while bouncing a foot off the "bed" every other minute.

Already went to the U.S. Consulate after an intense hazing (i.e., screening) process to replace S's passport and add visa pages to mine. Now vowing never to leave the bookstore I'm in until they throw me out. Then maybe I'll go see the pandas again.

春天来了

Currently traipsing about Yunnan province. S and I spent five days in Kunming -- the City of Eternal Spring -- where it was constantly sunny and warm and breezy, quite a change from the oppressive grey of Chongqing. The city was replete with greenery and flowers and food such as across-the-bridge noodles and random camel chuanr we found, and Yunnan coffee (no Starbucks in sight) and pu'er tea.

Yunnan's weather is especially wonderful after a few days in Beijing's freezing cold, which included yet more Peking roast duck dinners, Great Wall visits, and park promenading.

I also spent quite a lot of time getting acquainted with the Kunming police station, as S's wallet was pick-pocketed, which included her passport she had forgotten to take out. Our police officer was quite meticulous in typing up our report, and we spent an hour or so on Saturday night detailing the exact sequence of events, and then sitting around in a lobby while some guy handcuffed to a chair stared at me.

We arrived in Dali today via the Kunming-Dali Express bus after a harrowing survival of the mass of travelers at the bus station going home for the holiday; we spent the afternoon browsing stalls in the Old City and eating 生煎包 and 乳伞(a sweet fried cheese snack unique to Dali); tomorrow we plan to bike around Erhai Lake and visit the Three Pagodas and eat Tibetan or Bai food, and then on Saturday we will attempt to brave the general insanity of traveling on the eve of Spring Festival to catch a bus to Lijiang.