Oh the joys of vacationing...

Anna and I after we finally made it to the bus station. I think when we took this picture the events of the past couple hours still hadn't fully sunk in.

My first ride on a sleeper bus. I wish it would have been my last.

Anna's always making friends wherever she goes. This is the little old lady we followed on our bikes.

Some of the scenery on our way to...wherever the lady was taking us.

I took these pictures one handed while riding a bike and dodging busses, homeless people lying on the street and freakishly large centipedes. Pretty impressive eh?

Well, we just got back from vacation today and we are all exhausted! We left last Thursday and it was insane trying to get everyone out of here because it was kind of a last minute decision to go. To make a long story short, we finally got everyone on the bus and were on our way when I remembered that Anna had put me in charge of everyones passports and I left them in the apartment. So her and I jumped off the bus, booked it back to the apartment (I seriously have never sweat so profusely in my life), and caught a taxi to the bus station. We actually ended up making it there before the rest of our group did so it was all good. I just almost gave Anna a heart attack hehe. We took a thirteen hour ride on a sleeper bus to Guilin and arrived there early Friday morning. We then hopped on another bus and rode another two hours to Yangshuo where we stayed for two days. Our hostels were disgusting (and by disgusting I mean moldy squatters, rats outside the windows and fleas in the sheets) but they did the job. The first day our group, which consisted of seventeen girls, all decided to go up to the mud caves. Anna and I, being the cheapos that we are, decided to rent bikes for the day instead and get lost in Yangshuo. And get lost we did! We ended up riding a few miles and following this little old lady on a bike who took us to her village. She conned us into paying to ride a bamboo raft, which was cool but long. It was a good opportunity for awesome pictures of the scenery though. The raft dropped us and our bikes off in the middle of nowhere and we got completely lost in this village. It was so awesome though to see how most people in China live. We finally found our way out of the village and went exploring in the city. The most exciting thing we found were mangos, which is always pretty darn exciting let me tell ya! I'm officially addicted. It was a pretty awesome day.
Saturday we just hung around the city and did some shopping. Nighttime rolled around and all the clubs opened and that's when things got crazy. Just picture a huge group of insane American girls running in and out of every club they could find, screaming and breaking it down with the locals and that was us. It was a blast.
We woke up Sunday morning, got some breakfast and then took another bus ride up to the Longji rice terraces. The bus ride there was crazy and we ended up getting ripped off of like eight yuan by some jerk of a Chinese man. We were all pretty angry, but it's really only like $1.25 American dollars so we got over it pretty fast. The rice terraces were absolutely incredible! Definitely my favorite place in China so far. We stayed with a local family who cooked for us and let us play with their adorable little kids. We made the mistake of ordering chicken for dinner...and we heard them kill the chicken out back and then bring it out about an hour later chopped up into little pieces, feet and bones and all. It was pretty disgusting. The entire village was full of gigantic spiders and weird bugs. We only spent one night there, but I could have stayed for at least a few days more. The people were so interesting and the scenery was incredible. I loved it there.
We spent all day yesterday on lots of different busses back to Guilin where we got on another thirteen hour sleeper bus. We finally arrived back in Zhongshan around 7:00 this morning and just came home and crashed. As much as I loved experiencing true China with all it's weird food, smells and people, it's nice to come home to a clean apartment that feels like home.