Monthly Archives: January 2009

Flight home

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I’m in the Beijing Capital International Airport (BCIA) right now. Using the internet here which uses 0.05å…ƒ (yuan) per minute from the China Mobile SIM Card. That’s quite cheap so using it until we leave.

It’s been quite the past two and a half weeks. Have been to Beijing, Chengdu, Pixian and Ya’an and back again. Been to several airports and taken numerous buses, subways, cabs and cars along the way.

I’ll post more later once I get home and update for all the missing posts. See you later!

Monday January 5, 2009

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Today we got up early at 7:30.  However, we didn’t actually leave until 9am.  We had a quick breakfast at the noodle place again which was good.  We then got in a car with Justin’s sixth paternal aunt and a friend of hers.  They started driving and we left the main town of Ya’an and went up the moutainside.  After about 30-45 minutes, during which I thought I’d die several times because we’re driving up the side of a mountain with very little between a large drop and the road, we finally arrived at White Horse Spring (白马泉).  I tried to find a page in English about it, but there actually isn’t one.  It’s not something that anyone but Chinese ever go to.  There are a few pictures of it below.  You walk through some stone walkways and across a coy pond.  One of the cool things is what we went for mainly which was the spring.  Justin said that when it’s raining it sounds like horses due to the rain falling into the spring.  It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but although it was cold out, there was steam so it had to have been a hot spring.  If the weather was bettter we would have next walked up the mountain, but it was raining and the trail is just bare ground so it wasn’t really a good idea.

After we left the spring, we went back a little bit and walked around a recreation of a traditional chinese village.  There are pictures of this below, but a few of the interesting parts of this was that there were little waterfalls which were quite beautiful and soothing.  Also, although this was meant to look traditional, there was a bar there with tons of beer signs all over the place – looked like something you’d  see in America actually.

Next we drove back some more and took a detour.  After some more driving up steep mountainside, we ended up at the Ya’an Ecological  Zoo (碧峰峡).  I think because of the season when we went along with the time, there was very few people there at all.  The trip starts off with a short bus trip through open cages of lions, tigers and bears (oh my!).  After going through several cages and being quite close to wild animals (although being inside a bus), we were let off after we had safely passed the cages.  For the most part, I’ll let the pictures below do the talking.  We walked around the ecological zoo for a total of four hours, although it didn’t seem that long until after we finally got done.  To give a scope of how big this place was, there was a whole other section which housed pandas that we didn’t go to – that alone would have been at least another three hours.  I completely drained the camera battery and we had forgotten our other camera or else there would be even more pictures than are shown below.  We got to see almost ever type of animal, see many different shows – all of which had set times but since we were the only people there they just did them immediately – and even got to feed a white lion (from several feet away).  At one point about half-way through we entered an enourmous aviary which is the largest aviary in Asia (according to the zoo itself).

Once we eventually left, we went to dinner at a restaurant which was by a church.  After dinner we went back to our apartment for a short while and then left again to see more of Justin’s family.  This time it was his Mom’s side of the family and it was a nice apartment.  Of course, the people were very nice and the food was great.  There are a few pictures below at the end of several of the people including their kid.  It was funny because the kid decided while we were sitting on the couch that he wanted to heat up some oranges so he just threw them on the gas heater (seemed kinda dangerous) and we had to get them off before they burnt and caught fire.  It was fun.  :-)   His cousin gave me a coin which is actually from ancient China.  Dad has some replicas that are larger than the real thing, so I recognized it when he gave me it.  Obviously, they’re not common anymore so it was a very nice gift.

After dinner we went to Justin’s parents’ apartment where we tried to fix their Internet since it didn’t seem to be working.  This was interesting to me for a few reasons.  First, I finally got to see his house and Snowball – the family dog.  Many months ago they got the dog and showed Justin on video chat and let me name him.  I don’t know what it would be in Chinese, but I do know that it’s named snowball.  :-)   Second, I haven’t actually worked on a dsl connection since I worked at CSINet back in 2003.  So, I had to try to remember troubleshooting info and error codes from that long ago which wasn’t easy.  After setting it up on Justin’s laptop we got a bit further but decided that it would be best to just call the ISP in the morning so we left for the other apartment for sleep.

Sunday January 4, 2009

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Today we got up at 8:30 and this time we also both had the same amount of sleep, which was a lot nicer for Justin. We didn’t have time for showers as we didn’t have too much time. We were driven back to Chengdu where Justin and his mom went to his teacher and got a spare key to her apartment. We then drove to her apartment and quickly picked up our bag that we had left there. Next up was to drive to the bus station in Chengdu. As it was close to lunch time, we left the bags in the car and went to a restaurant for a nice lunch. It was interesting at one point because some tibetans came into the restaurant begging for money. Staff quickly got them out however. Once we got done with dinner, we grabbed our bags from the car, got tickets to go from Chengdu (程度) to Ya’an (雅安). As we had just missed a bus, we sat and waited for an hour.

Once the next bus arrived, we put our larger bags underneath and grabbed our seats. As there were two seats on each side of the isle, Justin and I sat next to each other and his mom sat on the other side of the isle. She quickly became friends with the person she was sitting next to and for the next two and a half hours, traded food between all of us and she talked with him and Justin while Justin and I talked or napped. The drive there was far better and calmer than driving in Chengdu. There is a highway that connects many of the further cities to each other and it’s different than even a tollroad in America. These roads are two lanes on each direction with trees all over the place to mute the sound. Also, since the area itself is very scenic, depending on the weather you can see mountains, etc quite easily. Once we got to Ya’an, the bus drove around and finally got to the bus station which was a lot more rural than in Chengdu. We took two taxis and went to an apartment that his dad is house-sitting at and that is where we will sleep for the several days. This apartment was interesting as it was actually two stories tall. The first floor contained a sitting room, bathroom, kitchen, living room and bedroom. The second floor contained a bedroom, another room and another bathroom that was bigger. For the most part, I used the upstairs bedroom as it had a normal toilet in it whereas the first floor contained a squat toilet, which I’ve grown to not really like too much.

After we got our stuff settled, we went to his dad’s side of the family, to one of their apartments for dinner. After dinner, there was naturally more pictures and I watched some TV while everyone talked. After we left we went to a supermarket for food and then went back to the apartment. we didn’t get to see Justin’s family’s apartment yet but I think we’ll get to tomorrow maybe. We pulled most of the stuff from our luggage and started to organize everything, which caused the living room of the apartment to become a chaotic mess as everything was everywhere. After we’d gotten everything organized however, we went back out again for a late-night meal of noodles just down the street. The small restaurant was open 24 hours a day and had noodles for 3-5 RMB a bowl – considerably cheaper than Chengdu and certainly Beijing let alone America.

Once full we came back to the apartment and took nice warm showers. I called home for the first time in a few days and then we went to bed. The bed as a very large four-post bed. If there’s not a picture below of it, I’ll try to take one later.