There has to be as many stray cats in China as there are dogs, if not more, but that’s okay because I love cats. China could not possibly have enough for me to love. And I would love them all if they would let me.

If you walk down any street, you’ll see them. They’ll be in the windows, laying in the shops, lounging on the stairs, or running for their lives down the street and into an alley way. I just pray that they are not a main course on anyone’s plate in any of the restaurants, especially mine. I could probably live knowing I just ate Fido because a small part of my soul will always hate dogs after working at Bermex, but I don’t think I would ever forgive myself if I ate a four legged creature that could purr.

For the most part, they are terrified of everyone or maybe it’s just me. Maybe the whole white aspect of my being is just too much for them to take. Some times I meow at them and they meow back and look a little curious, but for the most part I can’t get close enough to pet a hair on their head. If they see me coming they bolt the other way. One second they’re there and the next they’re gone. It is really quiet depressing. Now that I think of it, maybe they run because they think that I am going to eat them . . . I mean, I am in China where they eat EVERYTHING. And I mean everything.

The first photo is of Meow Meow, a kitty we found at the hostel we stayed at in Shanghai. It was where he had decided to live when he was just a wee little kitten(he’s still small enough to be considered a kitten) and the owners of the place let him stay. He was a very cute little kitty, as well as curious and a trouble maker to boot! During the days that Phil was too sick to do anything, I would go down to the lobby and pet him. He always thought I wanted to play and he would try to bite and scratch me in the playful kitten way of course. When I showed him Gloria, our cricket, he tried to eat her, but he couldn’t get her through the cage. I’m surprised that Gloria didn’t kill over in shock.

The last day we were there Phil went and got us our last McDonald’s meal that we will have for awhile and brought it back to the hostel. We ate it in the lobby since we couldn’t go back to our room anymore. We had checked out, but our train didn’t leave for another two hours. Meow Meow could smell our food and tired so hard to get to it. I gave him a little taste of a fry. What a mistake that was. He wanted more. He started the “I’m a poor defenseless starving kitty” act and had a perfect meow to go with it. He got a few more pieces out of me. I’m weak, what can I say. When we threw our left overs away, he went and sat next to the trash can and got popped by the owner each time he tried to carry any of it out. I felt so bad for the little guy.

This is a photo of one of the random cats we saw while in Shanghai. I took the picture because he looked so cute sleeping in the window. It was the way he had his tail dangling that won me over. Although, cats look cute no matter what they are doing. Heh. If you can’t tell, the shop was for door handles. I tapped on the glass to try to get his attention, but he was sacked out. His ears didn’t even flinch when I hit the glass.

Seeing all these cats made me miss my poor kitty, Morgan. I will be looking forward to seeing her when I go back home. I know that she won’t run from when she sees me. At least she better not or I will cook her up Chinese style!!

One more cat story and then I;ll bring this post to a close.

Last week, I went and sat in on one of Phil’s classes because I had nothing else better to do. And I didn’t feel like hiking up those six flights of stairs just to come back down them an hour later to eat dinner. He was still telling them about our trip to Shanghai instead of doing a lesson he should have (bad Phil) but the kids enjoyed it more so that makes it okay. He showed them some of the pictures we took and the kids ewwed and awwed. Very typical. They eww and aww over just about anything. When Phil got to a picture of me and Meow Meow he pointed at me and said, “Ta ai mao.” It means, she loves cats. Forgive me if I spelled cat wrong in Chinese. The kids though that was pretty cool and class continued fairly normal for the next few minutes until the back of the class erupted in shrieks and yells.

I had no idea what was going on. All the girls were making a fuss and everyone was jumping out of there seats and standing on them. I thought maybe a mouse, a rat, or a big bug had run into the room. But I was wrong. Before I tell you what they were screaming over, although, I am sure you know, Phil’s class room was on the second floor and a little ways away from town. It ended up being a cat. Yes, a cat. (I am convinced that I willed it into existence.) Someone yelled that it was a cat, but I didn’t believe it until someone actually picked it up and held it out to me. The cat was not happy at all. He was meowing like Morgan does right before she rips me to shreds. I grabbed the cat and tried to get him out of the classroom as quick as I could, but I found that difficult because all of the kids were more or less surrounding me and the stressed to all hell kitty was trying to wiggle out of my arms. I got him out of the classroom though and then found myself asking what in the world to do with him. I didn’t just want to let him run loose. He was in the middle of school campus and anything might happen to him. And that is when it hit me. This cat looked familiar. I even recognized his meow, which was really deep and coarse. Some of the kids insisted that he was theirs, but I knew they were lying. I asked them what his name was and they had to think about it and then picked a random one off the top of their heads.

The cat ended up being from one of the noodle shops at the bottom of the hill the leads to the school. I had seen him there on a few mornings and had petted him once or twice before getting on the bus to go to my school. I don’t know how he got to Phil’s school or what he was doing on the second floor, but I decided that it would be best if I walked him back home. I tried to carry him, but he didn’t like that and growled something awful. I must say that he didn’t bite or scratch me at all during his awful endeavor. At one point, I put him down and he started meowing at me and purring. I walked a way from him a little and he started following me. Believe it or not, the cat followed me almost all the way back to his noodle shop and the only reason he didn’t is because I picked him up. I thought there was too much traffic and he might run off if cab or something honked at him.

Once I got to the noodle shop, I put him back down and he seemed to know where he was. He plopped down on the stairs and started taking a nap. I went in and tried asking someone if he belonged to them, but of course, no one spoke a lick of English. I was about to give up and let the poor kitty fend for himself when a woman that could speak English showed up. I told her where I found the cat and that I knew it belonged here because I had seen it a few times. She asked a few of the workers if they knew who it belonged to, but they didn’t know. She said she was sorry and that she thought it was a stray, but then a guy walked out and started talking to the lady. She told me that he knew it belonged to the owners of the shop but they weren’t there or something like that. The lady said that it was a very nice thing that I did. I said no problem, and went on back to school so I could have my wonderful canteen dinner.

It wasn’t until later that I feared that maybe the cat became someone’s dinner at the noodle shop. I surely hope it didn’t or else I would feel really bad. I walk by the shop every morning hoping to see the cat again, but I still haven’t and it has been a few days. Of course, I didn’t see him that often there to begin with. Maybe he ran away again or the owners of the shop took him home. That’s what I hope anyway. That would make me happy.

Without any further delay, let me take you back to the week we spent in Shanghai. Like all things you enjoy, it went by a little too fast. Phil and I will need to go back in order to see the rest of it. We were only able to see a portion of the city.

Once Phil started feeling a little better, we decided to venture out into the massive city. And that is no exaggeration. Shanghai is something like 8 times bigger than New York City and has an unofficial population of 20 million. Although, if you asked anyone important, you might hear a much lower number like 14 million. Apparently, there are a lot of illegal immigrants here and they all live as squatters in the apartment buildings that are constantly being constructed.

Our first stop – food. We had been taking advantage of the western food that Shanghai had to offer. There are no McDonalds or Pizza Huts in Fuyang – only KFCs, so we tried to stock pile as many Big Mac’s and pepperoni pizzas that we could fit into our tummies. It was good to eat the yummy fast food fatness, but we could only eat so much of it. A Big Mack or a piece a pizza for every meal can make you wish for Chicken Feet and Snails . . . . okay, maybe not, but you get my point.

Shanghai is a lot easier to get around, in that I mean it is easier to order food because a lot more people speak English here. A lot more people. Almost every restaurant we went into had a English menu or had a server that knew some English. It made life so much easier. In Fuyang, we have to do something I call “Point and Pray”. In Shanghai, we knew pretty much what we were getting right off the bat. The first picture I have included came from a restaurant called Laava restaurant. Weird name, I know. I don’t know if they meant Lava as is hot molten lava or some other strange word I can’t think of. But we were hungry, so we didn’t care what clever name that had picked for their restaurant.

When we walked in, all of the tables were empty. I took this as a bad sign at first, but since I hadn’t seen any other places to eat – we decided to stay. The wait staff didn’t notice we were there for a few seconds because they were all asleep. Yes. Asleep. They were all curled up in the booths or had their heads down on the table. It must have been a very slow day. There was one woman standing behind the counter mindlessly cleaning a glass with a rag. She seemed out of it as well until she looked up at us. She nearly dropped the glass in excitement that she had some one to wait on. She immediately put the glass down, nearly dropping it in her happiness, and brought us a menu. She only spoke Chinese, but it didn’t matter because the menu was in English – so I was happy. An English menu is like a small piece of Heaven. She didn’t seat us right away, which I found weird, so Phil and I decided to order standing up. I ended up getting some Fried Rice and Phil got some Japanese Curry. It was one of the first meals we had had at a restaurant that we liked and knew what we were eating. I wanted to take a picture, and I did, but Phil thought I was insane for taking a picture of my half eaten plate of food. Do note that they had forks for us to use. We’ve gotten pretty used to chopsticks, but it is nice to use what you are used to every once in a while.

After lunch, we decided to visit my second home, Wal-Mart. Going here was one of our top priorities. I know that we are weird, but Wal-Mart is supposed to have everything and we needed to stock up on some things that we couldn’t get back in Fuyang. In order to get to Wal-Mart, we had to take a 20 minute subway ride, and then take another 20 minute walk – stopping every few blocks to ask someone in Chinese were it was. People slowly pointed us in the right direction and soon we saw a familiar sign. I was so happy that I did a little dance in the street. A Wal-Mart Dance of Joy.

It wasn’t quiet like I thought it would be. Mostly, it was just the name that was familiar to us. Other than that, the inside looked a lot like the other grocery stores that we have been to. The RT Mart, that we visit a lot back in Fuyang, is actually bigger and better. It wasn’t until we got to the second floor that we felt like we were in a Wal-Mart. It smelled like a Wal-Mart if that makes any sense and it had more of a design like one, too, except the departments were a lot smaller. I had to take a picture of the sign for the escalator. I felt a little funny holding up my camera to get it. I’m sure some of the Chinese customers thought I was nuts, but I thought that it was funny. The travelator. Heh. I want to know who translates this stuff for them.

Going to grocery stores in China makes me cry. Why you ask? Why? I’ll tell you. Every time that I go to buy fruit or vegetables, I have to walk past the live turtle, eel and crab section. In every grocery store, they have them. Some times they have the turtles in bags, which really makes me sad, but to see them sitting there waiting to bought and eaten totally just ruins my day. I know that it is no different than our Lobsters back home, but I don’t like seeing that either. It is one thing picking out a ripe apple or good looking carrot, but I know I will never be okay with trying to find the best turtle to cook for dinner. And even though I really don’t care that much for Eels, I still feel really bad for them, too. Poor little guys. I know that I have been severed eel a few times. Hopefully, I haven’t been given turtle, but there is no real way to tell. I watched a Chinese family try to pick out a turtle one day. They picked up one and looked as though were sizing it up against the other ones available. Of course, they wanted to get the one that had the most meat on its body and would taste the best with a side of cow stomach. I wish I was lying when I said they ate cow stomach, but I’m not. Why do the Chinese have to have such weird food taste? Why can’t they be meat and potato kind of people?

We stayed at a hostel for the week we were in Shanghai. I had never stayed in one before, and didn’t know what to expect. I always had visions of dirty, cheap places where you roomed with 8 other travelers you didn’t know. This was not the case with Koala International Youth Hostel. Phil and I booked a room for ourselves with a private bath and a small kitchenette. It also came with cable TV and internet access in the room. The one thing that was right about my vision of hostels was that it was cheap. It cost Phil and I a total of $144.00 for the both of us for 5 nights or roughly 990 yuan. It was a very good deal.

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Here is the view of our bathroom. The big yellow thing is the shower and the white thing on the wall is the hot water heater. In China, it is very normal to have a shower like this one. Even in our apartment, our shower consists of the wall and the floor. The hostel did give us a shower curtain though – which we used for an entirely different reason. The door to this particular bathroom is one big sliding glass door. Yep. A glass door. One that you can see through. So, Phil took the shower curtain and rigged it up so that you wouldn’t have to watch other people sitting on the pot. I’m glad Phil and I know each other pretty well – or else it would have been 10 times more embarrassing to go to the bathroom. The glass door nor the curtain could keep out the sounds. I’ll leave that to your imagination. Another good thing was that we got a western toilet. Squatting to use the bathroom, to sum it all up, just plain sucks. Also, if you use a public bathroom, you should always bring your own toilet paper. If you don’t – you could find yourself in trouble. This is also a norm of China. Holes in the floors and no toilet paper to wipe your bum. Nice visual huh?

And our little kitchen. I was surprised to find a microwave, a refrigerator, a table, and a pot to boil the ever so famous China water. It was more than I expected really. The refrigerator appeared to be brand new. When I tried to plug it in though, I hit my head on the door handle of our front door. I still have a bump from that. It hurt so bad that two little tears roll down my face. Thank goodness I have a hard head, or else I may have knocked myself out.

This was the view from our second story window. All of those high rises are apartment buildings. They are everywhere in Shanghai. And I mean everywhere. There are like 14 million people living here and it is 8 times larger than New York. Do note the blue sky in the background. It only drizzled that first day, but after that we had pretty good weather the week that we were there.

Once upon a time I went to Lisbon, Portugal and I rode the metro there during five o’clock traffic. That was a bad idea, and I will never do that again. Every time that we got on the Shanghai metro, which was pretty easy to maneuver once we got used to it, I had moments of terror – thinking that I may have a repeat of Lisbon all over again. I shutter now just thinking of it.

I’ll will post more pictures later, but I have a lesson plan to write for my little devils tomorrow. Ugg. I am not looking forward to teaching again.

Ah. Shanghai. Where do I begin?

Like usually there is so much to talk about, but I’m tired and can’t think of all of what I want to say. I didn’t take as many pictures as maybe I should have, but that just leaves me with more of a reason to go back to Shanghai one weekend. Heh. I could probably spend several weekends there and still not see everything there is to see. Shanghai is huge and spread out. Every street corner has something to behold. Well, I won’t keep you waiting. Here are some of the pictures that I took.

As luck seems to always have it – Phil was sick the day we departed Fuyang for Shanghai. Joy. He was hacking up all kinds of green goodness, but still managed to get all of his stuff together so we could make it to the train station in Hangzhou on time. This is a picture from the back of the bus we took on the way to Hangzhou from Fuyang. The bus, like every other bus, was bumpy for the entire hour we spent on it. I am beginning to think that buses here don’t have shocks because you feel even the tiniest bump.

We got to Hangzhou fine. That was the easy part of the trip. Getting to the train station was almost easier because all I had to do was hand the cabby the paper that Ruby(some random Chinese woman) had written on for us last week. It had the name of the station on it. He took off, and before long we were there. Then came the hard part. We had to try to buy return tickets by ourselves without a Chinese helper. With my phrase book I wrote down in the worst Chinese ever that I wanted 2 soft seat tickets from Shanghai to Hangzhou on the 7th of October in the afternoon. It went pretty smoothly, almost too smoothly, and I would find out later why. She handed me the tickets, I glanced them over, and deemed them correct. But they weren’t. And I didn’t figure it out until we were in the waiting room for our train. My eyes had been deceived! Everything that I wanted was on the train ticket except for one minute and very important detail. That little detail was that the ticket said from Hangzhou to Shanghai and not Shanghai to Hangzhou. 96Y down the tubes, but oh hell, at least it was only the equivalent to $12. It could have been worse. We got on the train anyway, hoping that we could fix the problem once we got to Shanghai. I can totally see why Eric, a guy who came to China the year before us, brought a Chinese friend along with him on his long distance travels.

Poor sick Philby. He didn’t enjoy his trip on the train to Shanghai. I wasn’t feeling all to great at this point either, but Phil was a lot worse off than I. Doesn’t he just look so sad in this pictures? He’s seen better days for sure.

Shanghai Train Station is a freaking maze to get out of. Or at least it was for us. I don’t remember seeing a single exit sign that actually led to an honest to God exit. We eventually had to go through an entrance door and that was fun because we had to push up stream through 100 anxious Chinese people who wanted to get IN the train station. It was a moment of LET US OUT LET US OUT vs LET US IN LET US IN(please see the movie Clue to understand this.) And then we had to try to find a taxi who could find Xikang Road where our hostel was. That was an adventure as well, one that got me all frustrated. All I wanted to do was get to the hostel so that we could go and find some food, but no taxi driver wanted to spend any time on us and when we finally got one to stop – it took a good while to finally get him to understand where we wanted to go. It took a bit longer for him figure out which end of the Xikang it was on. Did I mention that it was raining? No, I didn’t think so.

Here is one last picture of the train station before I head to bed. I will post more pictures and tell more stories of our week later, but I be a tired woman, and I need my beauty sleep. I was still sitting in my seat when I took this photo. I don’t know why I took it – it is just a man walking slowly down the platform. I wonder what he was thinking at that precise moment in time.

I saw this walking home the other day, and had to stop to take a picture. He probably thought I was nuts, but oh well, I got the picture didn’t I?

Back home if you see anyone trying to fix a power line there is always a big truck with a man sitting in a bucket and that bucket is on an arm extending upwards toward the power line.

Not in China.

I don’t know how the Chinese man got onto the power lines. I didn’t see a truck, a latter, or a stool, but he was there – sitting as pretty as he pleased on a little strip of wood that was tied to the wires. As he sat there he kept tugging on another wire that I figure he was adding to the present wires, but heck, he could have been doing anything. I was a meter reader, not an electrician. I just thought it was interesting to see how another country fixes problems like these. You would never, and I mean ever, see a SCEG employee doing this. No sir. Not in a million years. Can you imagine the lawsuits that would arise? I can.

I won’t ever know how the man got down either because after I snapped my picture, I scurried off. I know that China is developed in a lot of ways, but when I see things like this, and I see them more often than you think I would, I wonder how far back China is – in the sense of becoming a developed country. I guess China has a way to go in cities like Fuyang. Shanghai has to be more developed than this, right? I would hope so.

Fu yang Yong Xing School(Foo Young Yong Shing) – A private school filled to the brim with pesky little devils. That is what it should translate into, but no school would admit to such a thing. And if anyone ever asks me what Yong Xing means – that is exactly what I am going to tell them because the world deserves to know the truth.

The day before I taught, I imagined eager, but shy students to stand up and say “Good Morning Good Teacher” along with all the other niceties one would come to expect from such a so-called strict nation. I pictured a quiet class, one that would listen to me and raise their hands to answer questions. I thought that they might know some basic English, if not a little more. I imagined a lot of things. I wanted to believe that Chinese students were what every American teacher dreamed of teaching.

I could not have been more wrong.

I expected a lot a things to happen here in China, but I did not expect to find insane, rude, pesky, loud, annoying, fighting, little devil students in my classroom. More or less, everything I have ever been told or read went out the window the very first day I taught. I had a very serious O.M.G moment. But I kept my cool and tried to teach the helpless buggers anyway.

During my first week, I taught each of my 20 classes(I only teach each student one time a week) about me. I wrote the word introduction up on the board and then proceeded to tell them all the things about yours truly. I told them where I was from and all that jazz. I talked about things I liked to do – where I took a small moment to scare the crap out of them by acting out what kind of books Stephen King wrote. I would sneak quietly up to their desks and say, “Stephen King writes SCARY(insert slapping my hands down on their desk very, very loudly) books!” I almost made them all faint. The girls took it the worse, but I saw some boys trying to catch their breath as well. It is little pleasures like this that will help me get through the next 9 months. I know, I know, I’m evil – but you have to have some kind of fun into the classroom. I did a similar thing with the word crazy. When they couldn’t tell me what it meant – I would promptly throw my hands in the air and start screaming, “CRAZY, CRAZY, I’M CRAZY!!” That made them all want to faint again. At least I kept them on the edge of their seat that one day.

Anyways, I told them about my family and how many brothers and sisters I have. They couldn’t believe I had 5 siblings. Here in China, they practice the one child policy. I understand why they are doing it, but it is still a little sad. In the end, I had them get up and introduce themselves to me. All they had to do was read what I wrote on the board and fill in the blanks. The read very well, although all the answers were very similar. Copy cats.

This all in all sounds wonderful to you and it almost sounds wonderful to me the way I wrote it, but the painful truth is that they just didn’t care. I had to beg people to answer me. No one had questions . They were loud. Sometimes they refused to stand up. I heard “I don’t know” 100 different times. I don’t know is their way of getting out of not answering and they know that. They don’t listen. If I was their Chinese teacher they would have stood and greeted me. That did not happen. The do their homework for other classes on the front row right in front of me. It is truly insane. They fight, they talk, they pass notes, throw money and about a dozen other things as though I am not there. A lot of them don’t even bring paper or pencils. I think they think that my class is a free period where they are not required to learn. The worst part about it – is that I think the school knows this and they don’t care. It is simply amazing. That is all I can really say.

This week was on Friendship and Best Friends and all that neat stuff. They were so completely uninterested. I am at a loss on how to get them to want to learn English. I have only been here two weeks, and I am about to give up on the aspect. Maybe I should stand in front of class and just say random stuff and see what happens.

They can’t even remember my Chinese name for goodness sake. Even Phil’s students know my name and they have seen me like once here and there. My students don’t remember anything either. I can make them repeat something and make them tell me what it is – but if you ask them the same question 5 minutes later – they have no idea what you are talking about.

I’ve told some of the bad students that I would eat their souls for breakfast and that I throw bad students out the window and that I even burn homework from another class that is done and my class. I think I may burn the next homework I see someone doing while I am teaching.

Sorry for such the down post – but I hadn’t had the chance to talk about it much on the blog. I have more pictures of the school, but like normal – I can only post one at a time here at school for some strange reason.

Phil and I are going to Hangzhou this weekend to get a train ticket to Shanghai during the first week of October – National Day it is called. It is a holiday for just about everyone. I will be looking forward to going. There is a lot to see in Shanghai. One of the first places I am going to will be a Subway(the restaurant) and eat be a sub sandwich. It has been so long since I have had one.

Who ever it was that told me that Chinese food is good and filling lied. I hate you. And I mean that it the most loving way possible.

I have not gone into much of our flight over here, so I guess I will take the opportunity to do that now.

The flight was about 14.5 hours long. I don’t care what anyone says. 14.5 hours is a long time to spend on a plane – too long. I was doing ok for the first 6 or so hours, but then I just started going crazy. Crazy is a word I introduced to my students this past week. The way I describe it to them is how I felt for the last long leg of our journey.

Picture someone standing silent and very still and looking very happy right in front of your face. Imagine yourself standing right in front of this person and thinking he or she appears to be the most sane person you have ever seen. Ok? Do you have a good image stuck there behind your eyes? Alright, good. KWAMABMO!!! The person now starts screaming and running around like a mad monkey, throwing his or her arms in the air and then finally puts his or her hands on your shoulder and starts shaking you. ~ Shake shake, shake shake, shake your booty. ~

That is exactly how I felt, except I also had an urge to puke on the pretty attendant that would walk by offering me random stupid things that I really didn’t need. Toward the very end I went pretty nuts and came really close to using the barf bag that I have always seen but never needed. I couldn’t even bring myself to eat my last meal. The thought of it made my tummy turn.

When I act out crazy, my student’s flip out and nearly have a heart attack – especially the girls, but I get the boys sometimes, too. I love scaring the crap out of them. It brings much joy to my life. It helps me sleep at night knowing I have forever scarred them. Insert evil laughter. Hehe.

Here are a few more pictures of our flight over. The screen on the seat in front of me really helped me through the 14.5 hours of insanity. I never fell asleep. When we go home, I am so taking some sleeping pills, damnit.

Just seeing the word Shanghai got me excited. Although, it also made this part of the trip drag, and drag, and drag. I thought after 3 hours that our plane had maybe gone 2 inches. I was probably just delirious. I probably was. All in all I was up for about 30 some hours. And we all know that a tired Gabe is not a happy Gabe. I have been nicknamed Grumpy on occasion for a reason. I think I would have been happy landing in Beijing at one point and living there. Anything just to off that damn plane.

After sitting in the airport for 30 minutes waiting for more teachers to arrive we got on bus that took us to a bus station where we got on another bus that took us Hangzhou. I remember at least 3 things vividly. 1 – I wanted to die because I felt like crap. 2 – I thought I was going to die because we had the craziest bus driver in the entire world. It was like we were in a game of Crazy Taxi, but worse. 3 – Are we there, YET?! I didn’t think we would ever get to Hangzhou. It was the longest 70 KM I had ever driven.

We stayed at a place called the Babel Language Center for a few days. Besides the beds being harder then the floor (no I am not lying – it truly was like sleeping on the floor) it wasn’t all that bad. After getting some sleep, though, and some food and water, I was much happier. The picture to the left shows the excitement of my first day in China. The heat of China soon came, though, and wiped that happy smile off my face. As you can see from the picture below, the heat did not make me happy. I should have paid more attention to this day, though. It was one of the last days that I saw a blue sky. I miss my blue skies.

These pictures were taken at West Lake, as was the one taken of me above. West Lake was beautiful. Beautiful and hot. I need to go back when it is cooler. I would enjoy it more that way.

West Lake was covered in Lotus flowers in bloom.

Here are some Chinese tourists enjoying West Lake, the view, and the heat that could of fried an egg on the pavement. I would pay someone to send me a piece of a South Carolina sky or any western sky for that matter. I didn’t know how important a blue sky was until I didn’t have one anymore. I guess that is how things work.