I survived China!

I should say "I survived travelling in China during the May holiday" to be more precise. NEVER EVER visit China in May. Just take my word for it. Had a fabulous time despite the crowd. It is a whole new world out there, especially in Xi'An. My Beijing trip was more like a Xi'An trip as we spent almost 5 days travelling the old city. I must have taken about a thousand photos, so it will take awhile to post some of them.

I spent the first few days with Lanna, who works in Beijing. On May 2nd, her friend, Ren and Ren's husband, Wang Wei, went to Xi'An with us. Actually, they planned the entire trip, which turned out awesome. I'd like to think that the four of us brought the people of Xi'An much amusement - we had an American who lived in Beijing for a year who travels around with her Lonely Planet phrase book and Oxford English-Chinese dictionary (oh, and at least 3 different maps in her bag); a Malaysian Chinese whom most people think looks Chinese and assumes speaks Mandarin fluently, until of course, I open my mouth and start speaking broken Mandarin (the dialects and accents are very different in China); a local Chinese who speaks fluent Mandarin (of course) but also speaks in English half the time to Lanna and me, and then there's the husband who understands English but only speaks Mandarin.

Am still overwhelmed by how much we did in such a short period of time. I've seen enough tombs to last me a lifetime, and climbed enough walls, pagodas, mountains, and whatnot for the rest of the year. And here's proof that I did climb the Great Wall (okay, so it's a cheesy souvenir but you've got to do it at least once). I have to be honest and say that we didn't get to the highest fort - only because there are many entrances to the Great Wall and the one closest to us, called the Badaling Great Wall, doesn't take us to the peak. Nonetheless, we hiked till we could go no further.