"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.