And we have been since Sunday, July 25th.  What?  Already?  What happened to going to  Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, and Shangri-la?  After bumming it out in Yangshuo for a week, we decided it was a good time to make our way back to Linyi.  Money was a little bit of an issue, as I thought it would be.  Plane tickets just cost too much.  And we spent too much here and there . . . I mean, it was our vacation!  Plane tickets are relatively cheap in China if you compare them to American standards, but when you are not making an American salary, it hurts to cough up so much of your hard(haha) earned cash.

Hrm . . . where to start with my 900 some pictures?  Since we are on the subject of money, how about we take a look at how much we had before we took off, and compare it to how much we have left over after bouncing around the country for 20 days?

What does a person do with 22,200 yuan in cash?  I’ll show you.  🙂

Pretty amazing, isn’t?  Here is a few more shots.

And, well, I couldn’t just let it sit there and look pretty, now could I?  Nope.

I had to lay on it.  It is everyone’s dream, right?  And it couldn’t just end there.  Nope.  My dream wasn’t quite fulfilled.

Money may be the root of all evil, but damn if it doesn’t make you happy as hell.  And what became of our money, you ask?  How much of it still remains?  Can I still roll around in glee?  Hardly.  I’ve got a picture of that, too.

Just enough to pay the ferry to cross the river of Styx.  🙂  Actually, I doubt that is enough.  I don’t know how many jiaos equal a copper coin, so I may be short.  Drat.  And for those of you who don’t know, a jiao is one-tenth of a yuan, and approximately 6.8 yuan equals one US dollar.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, I have something like 900 pictures from my trip, as well as many others that I have never posted.  I still have a month left of vacation, so I am bound to have time to post them.  However, every time I sat down to right this particular post, my phone, both Chinese and Skype, rang and I was summoned or distracted.  It took me two days to get it done.  I decided to stay up later than usual tonight so that I could at least have something for my undying fans to read and enjoy(haha).  I have some errands to run tomorrow.  Phil and I met some new teachers, and they need help in finding a decent, but cheap computer.  So, no promises about how soon the next entry will appear.

My next entry may not even be China related.  I really need to post about something else – something that will probably open up my emotional flood gates again, but it’s something I feel needs to be done.  My baby Countess and Quantum deserve it.