Hitler?

Saturday June 26, 2010

We woke up very early on the train- 6 o’clock. I looked out the window for a long time, admiring the beautiful mountains and sunrise. We got to the train station, and it was a mob scene. We eventually all found each other and realized we had to fish out our train tickets so they would let us leave. We met our Tour Guide, who seems to be pretty nice. He has the best English I have ever heard. Lijiang is very pretty. We went to our hotel, which was looked like a traditional Chinese building, and was set up in a walking street that had the same style buildings. We could only put our things away though, because we couldn’t check in until after 12. We ate breakfast at the hotel and then freshened up from the train ride. We then went to the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. We met Chinese people in line for the mountain “tour bus”, and had a miniature photo shoot. We also discovered walnut cakes while we were waiting. They were delicious. They were small, shaped like walnuts, and had a very tiny nut and tiny bit of red bean sauce. I titled them “om nom noms,” because they tasted so good.

We rode a gondola up the mountain. Jeremy, Rachel, Kayla, Justin, and I rode with our tour guide. We had an interesting conversation that left us all speechless. This is roughly it:

Me: “It is so pretty up here.”
Tour Guide: “Yes, nature is so good. It is unfortunate though, people are killing it. We really need less people in the world. What Hitler did was a good thing. Maybe his reasons weren’t so good, but it was a good thing. We need something like that again.”
Us: …..

That is about all I have to say about that. Haha. We were silent the rest of the ride, which there luckily wasn’t much of. We all got off and asked each other if that really just happened. We walked down a path for a while to the Grazing Land. It was a huge field with a path going around it. There were trees with blessings people had tied all over. We then went to the White Water River that came off of the mountain. It was gorgeous blue/turquoise water. We only got ten minutes there, but we went over time. I would have loved to spend more time there. We then drove to Dongba Valley. Dongba is the religion in the Lijiang area. It seems more to be a way of life than a religion, however. We had a weird lunch and did some shopping. We crossed a rope bridge and walked along a path. The path had lots of funny signs and gates/games. There was one gate and tree for money and wealth. Another was a series of metal bars to lift up. The more you lifted, the more wealthy you would be. We then went to the Jade Water Village. It began raining a little, so we went through kind of quickly. We saw some crazy statues of people with gold animal heads. The village held the Dongba Temple, which was a little different than the Buddhist temples. It had a statue in the middle with different colored cloths wrapped around for each element. There were murals that described the history of the world according to Dongba. It seemed to have a strong regard for Good and Evil, but focused on Gods in general, not a God or a certain few Gods. It was nice to see something different, it being a minority religion.

We went back to our hotel, rested, and then went to get pizza for dinner. We found that the food around our hotel is really expensive, because it is a tourist area. I got water, and receive a cup that had boiling water in it. I was never able to drink it, but I knew the water wasn’t from a bottle or filter, so I wouldn’t have trusted it much anyway. Lijiang is apparently the city of clubs, and so our tour guide took us out to “the best one.” It was very interesting. There were too many Chinese men. Some were really old, and one was about 12. By the time we left, most of them were without shirts. Our tour guide ended up acting kind of creepy, so we avoided him. We came back to the hotel to watch the USA world cup game, but we fell asleep right before it started.