At Journey's End...

We came back to Toronto on July 27th after spending 24+ hours either on board a flight or waiting for one at an airport. Apparently jet lag affects people more as they get older which means I must be getting old because it hit me like a brick. I felt like I had the flu for two days. We spent a few days unpacking and getting reacquainted with being back in Canada, then we hit the road again, this time to do our rounds of visiting family & friends in Kingston and having some down time at the cottage.

Mike's grandfather and his brothers built a log cabin on the Big Rideau back in the 30s and they called it "Journey's End". This is where Mike and his cousins spent most of their childhood summers, *lounging in the sun, jumping in the lake, napping on the hammock... (repeat from *). We got to have 10 gloriously lazy days here and it was awesome. THIS, is cottage living:

     

Back in the real world time is flying by. We were really glad that we got to see Steve & Tina get married. Steve is the last of Mike's Queen's housemates to tie the knot and they had a lovely ceremony at the chapel on campus followed by dinner at the Portsmouth Olympic Harbour. I managed to snag a couple of really sweet photos of the two of them:

And now we have only three more days in Toronto and a single-spaced, size-10-font list of things to do and I am so overwhelmed I'm not even stressed anymore [for now]. We have to figure out health insurance, book a ton of apartment viewings, rent a car, sort through paperwork, balance our expenses from this year, renew health cards and driver's licences, do a bunch of stuff on the computer, visit some more people, oh, and pack up our lives all in the next 72 hours.

So, I'm just getting on with it, item by item, and not sleeping until I'm done and we'll see how long I last (it's 3:30am now so I'm guessing 6am?). I think the smart thing to do would be to stop blogging after this one, so I will catch you on the flip side (or whatever side the Pacific Ocean is to you) once we get settled in L.A.!!

Last couple of weeks in Taiwan

In the end we cut our China trip short by half and got an early flight back to Taipei after three weeks of touring around China. Mike's ulcerative colitis had started to bother him again quite a bit, and having lost 20lbs over the course of two months, he really didn't have the energy for the kind of high-intensity traveling we were doing.

To be honest I had gone on this trip hoping to correct some of the deep-rooted not-so-positive biases we Taiwanese people tend to have about China and the Mainland Chinese, and sad to say I was not totally successful in doing this so I was actually kind of relieved that we didn't end up doing the full six weeks as we'd originally planned.

But we got to see some pretty cool stuff (like crazy rock mountains and the Great Wall and pandas) and getting back to Taiwan earlier also meant that we got to spend some more time with family which was the whole point of this trip so it all worked out just fine.

Mike & I with my grandparents in Taichung

My sister Daisy & her boyfriend Roger

Mike & Willy shopping for kitten supplies

Me, my dad Alex, my sister Daisy, and my brother Willy

Beijing

Just realized I've left the blog hanging on Chengdu for the past six weeks... Ooops. Here are some of our favourite pictures from Beijing, the capital of China.

The Great Wall of China was definitely a highlight on this trip. The hour or so we spent hiking along the wall probably doesn't even add up to a speck when you're looking at the wall from space, but we were there!

The above two photos were both taken at the Emperor's Summer Palace in Beijing which is just west of the city centre.

Here's an unusually quiet shot within the walls of the Forbidden City, the Emperor's palace.

Chengdu

We were in Chengdu for three days and found it to be the most relaxed city out of the ones we've seen in China: people don't seem to be in a hurry and spend their days drinking tea, playing chess, chatting and hanging out.

We went to a few pedestrian-only areas which were filled with tea houses and boutiques, all retrofitted to the traditional style. We also had some delicious Szechuan food including ma po tofu, several kinds of noodles and dumplings, and spicy hot pot.

My favourite part about Chengdu, however, has to be the pandas. We saw our first pair of pandas back at the Taipei Zoo at the end of May, but here at the Chengdu Giant Panda Research Base, there were more than 20 pandas of all ages! Apparently over 80% of pandas in China can be found in Szechuan. They are so adorable, I could watch them all day!

Fenghuang

We took a 4.5 hour bus ride south of Zhangjiajie into a village made up of houses on stilts built along a river. The canals & gondoliers, the narrow, winding, cobblestoned alleyways, and even the street vendors reminded us of Venice.

The photos make Fenghuang look more peaceful and serene than it is: the nightlife here is one of its major selling points (bars & clubs abound) and though I found myself wishing it was less tourist trappy and commercial, I can't deny that Fenghuang is rather pretty.

Zhangjiajie

So far all the photos you've seen are from that ridiculously cheap 7-day tour of Shanghai and surroundings that we'd signed up for (6 nights at 5-star hotels, three meals a day, transportation to/from all attractions for $49/person -- how can you say no?). And whilst the hotels were a solid A+, the meals were quite bland, the shopping stops were soul-sucking, the days were long and exhausting, and we didn't feel like we were seeing the real China. We had to break free from the herd.

Besides, we needed the flexibility to abort our trip at any time in case my grandmother's conditions worsened (she's 100 and has been in hospital for nearly three weeks due to an infection in her lungs) or Mike's gastrointestinal troubles returned. So we bailed on the other two tours we'd tentatively booked and became free agents again.

We still wanted to see all the places we'd set out on our itinerary, but after Shanghai, we were on our own. Our first stop: Zhangjiajie. Remember in "Avatar" when they're flying around on birds through these cool floating rock valleys? That's this place. And was it ever cool.

We grabbed ourselves a room with a mountain view in the village at the foot of the forest park and spent two days hiking into the peaks and along the creek in the valley and admired the beauty and awesomeness of nature.

Zhangjiajie was honestly like the land before time... we kept expecting to see some sort of prehistoric life form to appear from around the corner. We took a gazillion photos so you can see for yourself --