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September 11 - China: Huangshan

This morning we had a Chinese buffet breakfast in the hotel that was less than delicious but the dumplings weren't bad.  We opted not to take part in the Turtle, Snake, or Bat Tea and instead had regular tea (we think).  

Huangshan Mountain

At 8:30, we went to the Huangshan mountain.  To get to the top, you can either climb thousands of stairs for approximately 2.5 hours, or you can take the cable car up the mountain.  Most of us, of course, opted for the cable car but Kitty, Robert, and Ken felt more adventurous.  We managed to get in line for the cable car before the 6 busloads of Chinese tourists, but we still had about a 45 minute wait.

Chinese tourists seem to travel in large throngs of tour groups with megaphone-toting guides (see yesterday's discussion of the need for loud volumes).  They also wear horribly loud matching hats and/or jackets within the groups.  We saw a group with big yellow hats, another with big red hats, and another group with red and yellow windbreakers and blue hats with red stars.  This latter group, by the way, was the group of the 6 coach buses and had a person on the tour whose job was to carry a LARGE flag on a flagpole.  We hear that October is the worst month to visit China because this is when the majority of the population is on vacation and the most touristy attractions are packed with these types of tour groups.  So we're happy that we're here in September.

Sorry - on to the mountain.  The cable car ride up the mountain was beautiful, but the top of the mountain was full of clouds.  We walked around the top for a while but really couldn't get any nice views.  And everywhere we went was infested with large tour groups.  

We could have stayed up on top and done some trail walks for a few hours, but Jon and I are suffering Internet withdrawal because we haven't been online for almost a week.  And the views weren't very good because of the weather.  So after a half hour we rode the cable car back down with Laurel, Anne, and Grant and went into town for Internet and lunch.

Tang Kuo

Tang Kuo is the name of the little town at the base of the mountain which holds our hotel.  Grant has a local contact here named "Mr. Hu" (Mr. Woo) who also has a restaurant.  So we left Anne there, Laurel went to get a phone card, and Grant took Jon and I to the Internet Cafe.  The Cafe was full of teenage boys playing some online shoot-em-up game in which they were all playing against each other.  The graphics were very good.

We were there for 2 hours, and then we went to Mr Hu's for lunch which wasn't delicious but wasn't bad either.  We caught a taxi and headed back to the hotel, where I spent a few hours working on the journal and Jon went for a very uphill run.

A Long Uphill Run (special appearance by Jon:  run #3)

After passing on the stair ascent up the mountain and taking the much easier cable car, I decided I needed to get in some sort of exercise.  This isn't too easy here in Huangshan because the roads only go either gradually up a mountain or gradually down a mountain.  I sort of plotted out my course from the hotel and ran for 25 minutes on the road we had used to get to the cable car, going only uphill!  The course was all switchbacks so it alternated between being in the sun and in the shadows and since it was only about 2 hours before sunset I got some great, clear views of the valley as the sun was setting.  Of course, what goes up must come down, so what was a 25 minute run straight uphill was a less than 20 minute run back down to the hotel!

Dinner at the Post Office

For dinner we walked down the road to a building with a lot of neon lights.  We sat outside and ordered dinner and looked around.  The building, it turns out, is a post office by day and a restaurant by night.  There were only 2 tables and we thought it was funny to look into the "restaurant" and see the post office customer service windows.  But the food was good and we had a good time teasing Laurel who has spent the afternoon in the hotel bar.

News from the US

We got back to the hotel around 9:00, which is 9:00AM EST.  I went to the business center to try to upload my journal entries, and Jon came to the room to try to get some news from the various Chinese TV stations.  Of course, this was just after the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  A Chinese news station was showing live feed from FOX/ABC/NBC/CBS, and we could hear the American anchors behind the Chinese anchors.  So we caught most of what was happening.

We were devastated.  We kept thinking of my father who is in the Pentagon daily, and my brother who occasionally goes there for meetings as well.  We also kept running over the names of the people we know who work in the World Trade Center buildings.  It's horrible.  Unspeakable.  I couldn't stop crying, and we stayed up until 2:00AM (2:00PM EST) until the Chinese coverage ended.

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