Hello from Dali China.
Because it was cold and rainy in the eastern part of China's south, we took a 24 hour train ride towards the west to the himalayan foothill town of Dali. The train ride was a bit miserable with Chinese people hocking loogies everyewhere, smoking cigarattes, and talking very loud on their cell phones in the middle of the night, but it was well worth it. Dali is a beautiful historic town with only about 40,000 people living here. this is tiny here!! Its considered a village. Anyways, it is sunny and dry just like the colorado foothills here. It almost reminds me of the landscape in colorado springs!! Today we rode bikes around the countryside and tomorrow we hike up to some buddhist temples and then we will continue north to some other towns with tibetan influences. So the picture downloading process is very tricky and risky it turn out! We almost lost all of our photos last time we attempted. I think we are going to upload them on to a different site like shutterfly. We will inform you all of the link as soon as we can. We are glad to be in the "less populated" region of China. The cities are dirty, crowded, and hard to manage at times. Chinese people love to shop. everywhere you go there are shopping centers. People love to spit everywhere and make sure to prep for them very loudly. (use your imaginations). Anyways, we are having a great time and enjoying learning and experiencing all these cultural differences no matter how nasty some of them are. We hope everybody is doing well and will write again soon.
